Greg Bear Interview Part 3: Analogy Collisions

by Damon Gambuto     Department: Correlations

Science Fiction Friday has finally cooled its jet and settled into orbit around this holiday weekend.  So comes to an end Mission: Ursa Major.  In this third and final installment of my conversation with Greg Bear, we talk about: predicting the future, law enforcement as an immune response, and the kinds of complications - both real and fictional - science can create.

Thanks again to Greg Bear for taking the time to chat with me!

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

Damon Gambuto: There's a section of the book - in the beginning - that struck me as one of a class of pleasurable moments I have when reading your books.  You make reference to one of the conspirators and the genetically engineered substance that he's creating.  He tells the possible buyer that after the victim is exposed... the subject will breathe a few grains, swallow it, touch it to his skin and "in time, examined in the dark, his lesions will grow green then red."  This is because they've inserted genes to prove that they've done what they've said they've done.  Am I correct in that characterization?

Greg Bear: Those genes are used commonly into bacteria, even into cats.

DG: Exactly, that was my moment of pleasure reading your book.  Where you point to a particular bit of gene insertion and that all of a sudden I'm reading about on the front pages of my news blog.

GB: Yeah, absolutely.  But that's not my fault.  We've been working with those genes for ten or fifteen years now - probably longer than that if you trace it back.  They're indicator genes.  They work reliably.  If a gene is activated, you can attach this to that gene and bang it'll glow and so you'll know that the gene has been activated.  It'll trigger off a detector and so on.  Technology that shows up in today's science blogs - actually - can be quite old.

DG: I remember a conversation you and I had at an earlier date.  We were talking about William Gibson's quote about the future already being here, it's just not evenly distributed.

GB: (laughing) I like that.

DG: I made reference to it in one of my earlier blog entries and I find in your work - and a lot of the science fiction authors I admire - that's what it feels like much of the time.  What you're alerting me to is not so much of amazing and extrapolated future, but rather a well-researched and thought through version of my present.  You know, you're alerting me to a world that's around me that I'm not wholly aware of.  What was interesting reading QUANTICO  was it's in a context that I don't confront so often in the science fiction that I read - and that is in the world of law enforcement.  It reads a little bit more like a hard-boiled detective novel in some respects.  Talk to me about that issue.  Dealing with law enforcement.  You obviously have a lot of respect for FBI agents and what their project is and what the project of law enforcement is.  Talk about all of that stuff.

GB: The people who put themselves in harm's way certainly deserve our respect.  They among the hardest jobs on earth.  The people who take risks, they put their own lives at risk...but also they can put our civil liberties at risk and they are well aware of that.  But still they have to get the job done.  Psychologically they tend to be evenly divided as thinkers.  They believe in good, they believe in bad.  You try to explain to them how bad fades over into good, they're not ready to listen.  Within their job requirements - their psychology - they really have to go at it like attack dogs.  They just have to be totally dedicated to that.  While one can sympathize with that and appreciate it...and we need that kind of psychology in law enforcement...the downside is that psychologically they can get broken down over time.  They can have problems with alcoholism and drug use even.  They can, of course, go bad.
 
Now the analogy for me there is: this is just what happens in the body's immune system.  Our police officers, law enforcement officers, and our military function - in many respects - as our immune system in the world.   And we have things that go wrong in our immune system.  We have autoimmune disease.  When you have a political party that prides itself on protecting America, taking over and then causing damage to America for political reasons or even for strategic reasons - perhaps just getting it wrong - you have what amounts to arthritis, autoimmune disease.  It slows us down, slows down our response time.  

All of these analogies collide in my head.  In my mind, sociology is biology. They both interact with each other, they both have parallel structures.  So I look at the whole structure of American politics, and technology, and law enforcement and the psychology of law enforcement as part of this: "Gosh, we really need our immune system, but what happens when it goes wrong" kind of approach.  And that makes a fascinating read. 

The reason QUANTICO reads like a hard-boiled novel is that when you deal with criminals, you really do have to develop a kind of a hardened psychology.  You can't be totally sympathetic.  It's your job to get them off the street.  Very few people are capable of understanding and sympathizing with a criminal and - at the same time - causing that criminal pain and damage by removing them from society, putting them in jail, prosecuting them, or executing them. It's just tough to hold those two attitudes at once.  The hard-boiled approach is - kind of - the literary version of that psychology I think.

DG: Talk to me about the process of creating a near future landscape.  As we were talking about the gene insertion and the pleasure I took in recognizing my present in what is - fairly - a science fiction novel.  More of a tomorrow afternoon time-frame, but still science fiction.  Talk about that process of creating a landscape tat doesn't exist.

GB: Well, actually I've a lot of predecessors in this area.  Not just people like Tom Clancy, but I've always enjoyed the near-future thrillers.  Going back to my days as a teenager reading ANALOG when John W. Campbell would publish novels by people like Joe Poyer, Ben Bova, go on and on and on.  There were all these stories from that time that just really close to us.  Later on there were a number of submarine novels like THE GOLD CREW or John Ball's THE FIRST TEAM go on down to Tom Clancy finally who suddenly hit big and blew the genre right out of the water.  And suddenly, it was split off science fiction.  Techno-thrillers became something different.  So when people say "Well, you've changed, you're not writing science fiction anymore. I say, "Look, I'm a traditionalist.  Back in my day that was science fiction." I believe that Tom Clancy regards himself, in some respects, as a science fiction writer still.

DG: I quite agree. It's an argument I make to friends of mine that don't see the genre as belonging... as important and widespread part of our literary culture.  That's interesting to hear from someone dealing with the problem of classification.  I wouldn't have been surprised if you had - if for no other reason than the imperatives of marketing books - classified QUANTICO as something other than science fiction because I know quite often that...

GB: (Laughing) That's been going on for forty-five, fifty years now.  Look, I remember when Ray Bradbury asked them to take the label science fiction off of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES!  That was so that he could get reviewed by people who pay attention to "books."  

Later on, Kurt Vonnegut would come along and he would correspond with the science fiction writers back in 1959 and 1960.  Originally, he would sort of snuff and say "You know guys, I don't think you're doing right."  And then he would strip the label science fiction off and - in his own inimitable way - take the satire and the Mark Twain approach and really kick ass with that in the marketplace.  But along the way he just couldn't admit that he was writing science fiction.  He would send little hand signals to people so they would know he knew what he was doing.  

Ray Bradbury, for example,  would never deny that he was writing science fiction even when - by and large - what he was doing were fables or fantasy.  He always felt respect for science fiction and fondness for the field.  We've always had that back and forth.  

I think the major reason people want to shy away from science fiction is that there's this big scary word in that phrase which is 'science'.  You know, science is a bunch of nerds doing things.  And nerds are scary people.  One they may not dress quite right.  They have pocket protectors, black pants, white shirts - you know - calculators or slide rules.  They may not know how to comb their hair.  Their personal hygiene may not be perfect, and yet they change the world.  Well, that's scary.  And that's the attitude we had back in the '70's and early '80's. And then, in late 1980's - Wham! - nearly all of the billionaires - the new billionaires on earth were nerds.  They love science fiction.  They grew up not just programming computers, but reading science fiction paperbacks.  

And as soon we moved up into the Seattle area in the late 1980's, within a very short period of time we were introduced to most of the billionaires in the area and found out that this was, in fact, the case.  Eventually, of course, after meeting Paul Allen, I was waiting for him to do something interesting and he did.  He put together the Science Fiction Museum.  My wife and I and a number of very talented people worked on that to help him bring what was, in effect, his childhood inspiration -  beginning with stories like ROCKET SHIP GALILEO - to the public.  Telling that story to the public.  It was a privilege to work on that.  

So this whole notion of science fiction and literature - the back and forth - it's a clash of cultures.  And when you are familiar enough with both cultures, and I am.  I know a lot about literature, I know a lot about science fiction.  It's - kind of - tough to get them together.  It's like playing a matchmaker to two people who really aren't suited to each other.  The literary folks are kind of fashion-conscious.  Nerds are not fashion-conscious.  Nerds can break themselves down into word-nerds and math-nerds.  Fashion people understand society and interactions and socializing.  But nevertheless the two are necessary.  They have to fit together.  Watching this clash in the literary world in New York publishing is absolutely fascinating.  And yes, indeed - to get back to the point - sometimes you do have to pull back and say, "Well, if I'm on one show, I'm gonna say this is a techo-thriller."  If I'm on another show - talking to another audience - I'm going to say, "You know this is science fiction."   You've got have it both ways sometimes.  I hope people understand, I've got my chops in supporting science fiction long enough and when I say "techno-thriller" you can reads that I mean "of course that's science fiction."

DG: (Laughing) Fair enough.  I think our readers are firmly planted in one camp.

GB: They're fashion-conscious camp, aren't they?

DG:  Yeah, that's it. Well, I want to wrap up here, but before let me ask a two-part question.  The first part is...it's a question I often get  about my fascination with this kind of a novel...People often feel these narratives have very pessimistic outlooks about our future and rely on doomsday predictions.  I might argue that drama needs conflict, but we'll set that aside.  I'm curious to know: what is your real world perspective on the challenges we are facing? Do you feel optimistic?  Do you feel pessimistic?  Is that not something you think about and you're more interested in just watching it all happen?  And then related to that...I'm curious to hear what your next project might be.

GB:  With regard to the future, I'm probably not optimist, nor a pessimist.  I think in terms of organic structure.  You know, life goes through cycles and those cycles spiral up and change.  So basically, I don't think we are ever going to have paradise and I don't think we are ever going to destroy ourselves either.  We got through the '50's and '60's and '70's without destroying ourselves and - for people who lived through that - that's actually a major miracle.  

I think the biological revolution, in some respects, is going to be more challenging.  We're gonna be able to reshape ourselves, to redesign ourselves, to get rid of disease.  So in that sense that's positive.  But if we redesign ourselves and don't get it right, that's negative.  If we allow of the prejudices of the past to be empowered by the technology of the future - so we all end blond-haired, blue-eyed kids with laser eyes and psy-powers, that's a bad thing.  But if we end up with children who don't get genetic diseases and aren't susceptible to childhood illnesses and we can get rid of cancer that's a good thing.  But then if that goes around the world and people start living to be 175 years old and we have ten billion retired people living on the planet by the year 2040, 2050 is that a good thing?  Everything changes, everything is a challenge.  And you know, that's the nice thing for writers, as you say, writers really do rely on conflict.  And boy, we're gonna have a lot of conflict to write about here.

DG:  All of us at WIRED Science encourage you to not be among the ten billion retirees and keep writing.  Tell us what your next project is.

GB:  Instead of going near future with high-tech police enforcement, I've decided to go a hundred trillion years into the future and give you a world that you've never imagined.  I picked a quote from the Firesign Theater, at the beginning of my next book CITY AT THE END OF TIME.  I remember their albums back in the 1970's and one of them was entitled EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG.  And that's the hallmark of this book.  Everything you think of in physics, in cosmology, in the way time works, all of that is basically wrong.  And we take you to a future world that is about to collide with present day Seattle in - I think - a very interesting way.  So I'd say it's more of a philosophical fiction novel because the science is so far beyond anything we can prove or disprove that it becomes, as Arthur C. Clarke would say, indistinguishable from magic.

DG: I'm excited to read it.  Thanks again for taking the time to chat with us.

- the end -


Greg Bear's new book is QUANTICO.  Look for his next one, CITY AT THE END OF TIME, in 2008.  And remember:

Do you dream of a city at the end of time?  If you do, you might be in trouble.

Tags: City at the End of Time, Greg Bear, Quantico, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Friday

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