Greg Bear Interview Part 2: The Bullet You Don't Hear

by Damon Gambuto     Department: Correlations

Science Fiction Friday is so big this week that it can't be contained by just one day.  As SFF expands beyond the day of Venus and into the weekend, Greg Bear opens up about his writing process, the longstanding tradition of science fiction writers consulting with the government, and how we better learn how to dodge the bullets we won't hear.

(Continued from part 1)

Damon Gambuto:  Let's take a moment to step back and talk about the plot of the book and how you conceptualized it.  I'm curious about your process with respect to plotting.  Do you see political machinations and think of plots that get at some of the implications of them, or does plot precede that and these sorts of issues are revealed just by the nature of human beings having to deal with what is...you know... an extension of our current climate in this near future narrative?  That future needs to play by the rules of the present in many respects and that means that people have to deal with the implications of the present.

Greg Bear:  Yeah, it's all of that.  It all kind of comes together in a big smush eventually.  But what I think about first is...is...the major character is going to be the culture.  What's the culture going to be like in the time period in which I am writing.  The characters, individual characters, while they have their own strengths are going to be reflecting those cultural changes.  And so how are their careers going to be affected?  How is their psychology going to be affected by the politics and the emotions of the time?  

The technology then is influenced by what the characters want or need.  And they're going to pick up on what they want or need.  And they're gonna ignore or leave behind what they don't think they need for the moment.  That structures the whole world in which the plot exists.  Once you have the characters, the culture, and the tools they're gonna be using then the plot begins to develop.  How do you put the characters into situation that are not only appropriate for their paygrade - so to speak - but are going to put them into positions being able to perceive the key elements of the story.  All of that starts to come together as I write the book and a lot of it is - of course - subconscious.  I don't really know how I'm going to pick a scene.

I spend a lot of time reading other people's books to get prepared, to see how they structure their novels.  Sometimes I pay attention.  Sometimes I ignore their structure - maybe to my peril - but along the way the whole thing eventually sort of falls into place and I get a broad plot outline.  In this case, the publishers wanted to have a ten-page outline just to follow through on what they had been told in a two-page outline a year or so earlier.  So I developed a ten-page outline, and that outline was largely what I did.  But that would be a couple of years into the process of thinking about the book.  So it really is a long period of fitting puzzle pieces together to make sure that they are all convincingly arranged to make a picture that I think will be entertaining and at the same time maybe a little frightening, maybe a little enlightening.

DG: Going back to what you were talking about with respect to the technology and what the characters' needs might be... Can you talk a little bit about that opportunity to go to Quantico and then maybe delve into the Sigma Group and what that opportunity was about and your experiences with your other science fiction writers.

GB:  Well, you know, science fiction writers have been consulting for a long time now.  I've pointed out before that H.G. Wells actually met last century with two Roosevelts in his lifetime.  He met with Teddy Roosevelt, I think around 1907, and later on he met with Franklin Roosevelt.  And in both cases the Roosevelts were very interested in his views on the future; how things would change.  I think that gives science fiction writers at least a hundred years of consulting with the politicians in Washington D.C.

My experience began in 1983 when Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were sponsoring the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy.  I was not in the early meetings, but Jerry invited me and I was both - kind of  -  overwhelmed and fascinated by what I saw there which was generals, rocket scientists - literally - rocket engineers, NASA people including NASA administrators, astronauts, science fiction writers, political thinkers.  All gathering together in Tarzana to prepare papers that would be presented to President Reagan on national space policy which at that point was focusing on what Danny Graham, General Danny Graham, was referring to as - what would become - the Strategic Defense Initiative.  Now I come from kind of a liberal perspective and a lot these folks were heavy duty conservatives.  But they were smart conservatives and they had had experience, and so I could - you know - sit down and listen and learn a lot from what was going on here.  And I applied what I learned in those meetings to books like EON, to later on to THE FORGE OF GOD.  The military, political perspective was really pretty nicely laid out by meeting all of these  people and talking with them.  

That went on for a number of years and finally came to an in 1999.  I think our last meeting was when NASA administrator, Dan Goldin, called kind of a special meeting of the Citizens' Advisory Council to ask for us to develop  ways in which NASA could develop privatization of space, spaceflight.  That was another fascinating meeting... actually had all day with Dan Goldin.

Around 2000...because DARWIN'S RADIO had a pretty detailed, heavy-duty approach to genetics and microbiology, I started getting requests from people to attend meetings on genetics and DNA.  One of those early meetings I met with a group of people involved at the Molecular Sciences Institute and talked with geneticists, scientists, young scientists who were going to be going off to Washington to propose science policy. To do that sort of stuff, but also going to their own research in areas like nanotechnology and, of course, in genomics which was hot issue at that meeting in 2000.  

At that point I was publishing a book called VITALS which was dealing with a very unusual kind of mind control involving bacteria.  A subject which - I think -  kind of - went over the heads of a lot of my readers at that point.  They didn't quite understand what was going on in biology.  They weren't quite prepared for it.  I think they are more prepared today, but around the turn of the century there was too much going on in biology - even for most biologists - to keep up with it.  So I was a little ahead of the pack even though my books were near future - you know -two, three to five years down the road the perspectives of biology that I was discussing seemed a little weird to a lot of readers.  So VITALS was met with a mixed reception.  I don't think they actually believed that you could have a city of bacteria in your gut that could determine your psychological outlook.  That was a little too far from the accepted notion of intellect and control of its world.

Around 2001, with 9/11 and the whole change in the political perspective which was - in a sense - kind of disappointing.  Certainly in the long term.  We had been facing these threats for a very long time.  This was an extraordinary example of those threats, but not as if we hadn't known these things could happen.  Tom Clancy was writing about people driving airliners into buildings years before.  We were not unwarned.  We were terribly unprepared.  So a lot government agencies decided that they needed to talk to people about - you know - "Tell us what we don't know," is what they were asking.  And that's become a tradition now in Washington, DC is to hold conferences where people are invited to tell the so-called experts what they don't know.  

Now that's a tall order, actually, because they are pretty smart and they do think of a lot of different things and talk to a lot of different people.  They have a lot of experts on call.  But every now and then you can imagine a group screenwriters, say, or movie producers who are used to producing thrillers, or science fiction writers for that matter, could get together with, say different agencies in government and possibly come up with something they haven't thought of.  Or a scientific or technological thing that they might be able to use to reduce our level of threat.  

That began, probably in 2002, as I recall now.  Threat assessment meetings with different agencies.  And again, science fiction writers were brought in and that was interesting because you're working with a lot of good people there.

DG:  Who were some of those folks?

GB:  By 2003, I had been to several of these and was putting together a notion in my mind that perhaps what we needed was a biological defense initiative.  Not just so much to take care of the possibility of bioterror, but to also be prepared for natural epidemics, natural incidences of disease outbreaks.  So I proposed that to the Woodrow Wilson Institute in 2003 as a possibility.  Around that same time a number of other people came up with that same proposal, similar proposal.  And in 2004 George Bush put something into place similar to that, but I actually don't know how effective that's been.  Certainly it didn't have the impact and draws as much money as the Strategic Defense Initiative did.  

So that was what was happening when I was conceiving of QUANTICO.  One thing I have always thought when I write my fiction is... there's a basic rule in both strategy in war and in politics which is the bullet you don't hear is the one that gets you.  It's an adage that's been with us since at least World War I.  And I think it's true.  You know, we spend so much time on the known threat, we can't really prepare for the unexpected. For things that some clever, poorly equipped, but very dedicated individual can do.  

And what we've been focusing on for years now is foreign terror.  What we were losing focus on to some extent is domestic terror.  Which was certainly a high profile item when I was at the Academy in 2000.  People from the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups when they are talking about these issues...that there were still a lot of domestic terrorism issues that haven't been resolved.  The FBI, after Murrah Federal Building bombing, had really come down hard on some extreme right groups in America and helped to shut a lot of them down.  But I didn't think that threat had gone away.  So I combined those two in my head.  I said, "Okay, what are the bullets you don't know?"  Well you're gonna expect people to be using anthrax on you.  Your gonna expect them to be using the sort of things we heard about in the horror days of biological warfare research at Fort Diedrich or in the Soviet Union or in South Africa or whatever.  One of the interesting follow alongs about 9/11 was that there was an anthrax attack which today is almost forgotten.  The Amerithrax, American Anthrax Murders, killed five people and got a lot of people sick and - you know - caused probably billions of dollars in damage in terms of having to clean up the postal system and having to get rid of contamination of different government buildings and network offices.  And all of this, as far as we know, was done by perhaps a single individual.

DG: Isn't something of interest about that case that they don't know exactly who it was?

GB: Well, they still don't, right.

DG: Right, and it kind of goes untalked about that this major terror attack has basically been left unsolved.

GB: Well, the FBI last year - this after the publication of QUANTICO which came out in the U.K. about two years ago now - the FBI finally admitted that the profiles they had set up for this weren't working out.   And what there profiles had been was - you know - that they had to have...whoever had sent these anthrax letters out, or developed the anthrax powder in these letters had to have bioweapons training.  Had the same sort of expertise that someone coming out of Fort Diedrich would have.  And so they developed a profile from that basis and went after an individual that they just never were able to pin the case on and it looks now like it was a red herring.  Later on they admitted that.  They said it would have to be an intelligent individual, but not necessarily someone with biologist's training.  That fits right in with the scenario I devised years before in QUANTICO.  So I think we're kind of at ground zero there.  

But my notion was - okay - now anthrax is a know threat.  What could possibly be done that would deal with threats that we don't know about. So the actual threat in QUANTICO is not anthrax.  But certainly the FBI is still pursuing this and - in fact - this last year I ran into a number of agents, one of whom had worked on the American anthrax case, and I said, "Well, whattatya know?" and she said, "I can't tell you." So it's still under development.  I don't think it's a very high profile case right now, but cold cases have a way of lingering in the psychology of agents and law enforcement officials and I think we may eventually learn what happened here.  I just don't know how long it's going to take.  Look how long it took us to catch the Unabomber and that was because of a family connection.  Something of a fluke actually.

DG: Right, and that's something that law enforcement faces quite often in these scenarios... the television magic of CSI doesn't really exist in real world crime investigation and quite often criminals are caught by dumb accidents, getting pulled over on the freeway, or, like you said, a family connection where somebody reads a news story and realizes they know the person that police are searching for.  Am I wrong about that?

GB:  That's true.  That's absolutely correct.  And that's what I wanted to reflect.  I wanted QUANTICO to reflect more of a real world perspective on how law enforcement actually works rather than the CSI version - which is very pretty, but it's kind of a fantasy for a law enforcement officer to sit down and watch CSI.  Even some aspects of LAW & ORDER which is a little grittier, but even so their technology is very fast and very effective and that's just not the way it actually works.

...to be continued!

Tags: Greg Bear, Quantico, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Friday, Sigma