Greg Bear

Transcription

>> Hello, welcome. My name is Chris Tafay. The Authors at Google speaker series is honored to welcome author Greg Bear to Google Santa Monica. Greg Bear is the author of more than 30 books of science fiction and fantasy, including Quantico, Blood Music, the Forge of God, and Darwin's Radio. The recipient of two Hugo awards and five Nebula awards, Bear's books cover topics as diverse as galactic conflict, artificial universes, networked intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. In addition to being a prolific writer, Bear has also served on political and scientific action committees, advising Microsoft, the U.S. Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories, and other groups and agencies in the course of this rather remarkable career. Please join me in welcoming Greg Bear as he discusses his latest book, Mariposa. >> [Applause] Greg: Thanks for coming out here, and thanks to all the people in the far flung corners of the world here. Mariposa is a follow-on to Quantico, which had an interesting history which is nearly legendary now. As a science fiction writer, I thought I was continuing to write science fiction, but some of my editors suddenly realized I was moving into technothrillers, and they didn't want to do that. And so, I was kind of caught betwixt and between in a little bit of trouble. Finally, it came out, and it turned out it didn't matter. People liked the book, and it was one of my best selling books. So publisher came back to me and said, "Let's do another one." And I think that living well is a dish best served cold. So we're on No. 2 of an impossible series here, which -- and I still don't know, you know, is technothriller or science fiction -- I don't think there's much distinction. Back when I was a kid, reading analog, John W Campbell would publish stories that would deal with, you know, new fighter aircrafts, superfighter aircraft with a pilot jacked into the control system working on a hallucinogenic drug to heighten his sense of perception -- top secret, superfast, over North Cape, crashes. How do you get him out? That's a Tom Clancy story. But it was an analog science fiction. So I grew up thinking that technothrillers were science fiction. I think Mariposa -- I'm actually moving into another cycle here, which I was a little surprised with. When I finished Quantico, the book was published in 2005, written between 2003 and 2004. It describes a severe economic downturn in the United States. Well, that may or may not be prophesy, because it was perfectly obvious to me that was coming. In Mariposa, a couple of years down the road, we're coming out of that, but we have major difficulties. And so, in coming so close to the future that you actually live what you're writing about, I think I need to listen to myself a little more in terms of the stock market, which I didn't. Yah, I'm not supposed to be a prophet. I don't think science fiction typically is prophetic, but it does in this case -- I think, when we get that close to the present, we need to be really kind of politically sensitive and organically sensitive. I regard politics as biology. And that biology can be predicted if you think of trends, of personalities, of countries that have personalities, of psychological profiles -- think of a nation having a psychlogical profile. So maybe I'm a profiler of our country. And in Mariposa, what I'm profiling is a major security problem. Our security problem is that we put ourself in so much debt, perhaps $20 to $40 trillion over the next ten years, that we owe our soul to the company store. Now, we've been pretty plush up until recent times. And so, our instincts aren't honed for that particular difficulty, and our security instincts really aren't honed for that at all. We still think, you know -- despite the economic downturn, we still believe that we're in charge of our destiny. But if you look at what's going on right now with Clinton going to China and Obama going to China. They're not being very hard on China, why? Because China owns us -- a substantial portion. [pause] So the upshot of all of this is that, in Mariposa, we've got a major security problem with internal sources. That is, Axel Price is a CEO of a major corporation in Texas, which provides government services and training. And that's been a real issue for me, because I don't believe we should be outsourcing things like prisons, military logistics and that sort of thing. Along the way, we're also dealing with the situation that I had in Quantico -- the description of our security problem as being not so much from outside, which is the typical technothriller, but from within. [pause] I think the dictum that I follow -- ascribe to most -- is Pogo's dictum, "We have met the enemy and he is us." And both Quantico and Mariposa are about our eternal problems. And we've really been our own worst enemies since the beginning. If you think of the worst war we ever fought, it was with ourselves. [coughing] Excuse me. I've been fighting off a cold here. The whole notion of our history being a kind of a tangle of strong passions fighting up against each other is fine as long as we're stable, as long as we don't have severe imbalances. But with this economic situation, what if our internal enemies decide they want to reenact something that's been supposedly gone for 150 years? And that's the situation. Now, in Quantico, my characters -- Rebecca Rose, an FBI agent -- is now on furlough in Mariposa. She's looking to start a life -- to live a life -- which she's never really had. Because an FBI agent, as a female in a patriarchal, male-oriented community, she's never been able to really do that. But she's on furlough, she started to set up a family. She's trying to adopt a girl. And this is where things get interesting, because I'm now going back full circle to novels that I wrote in 1989, realizing the political situations I was talking about in 1989 -- in a novel called Queen of Angels -- are happening today. The setup is perfect to just blend Mariposa into the universe of Queen of Angels, which is a universe in which you have computers becoming 'competors' and eventually thinkers -- in which you have, in 2047, everyone been therapied. Effective mental therapy gets rid of all of our little foibles -- our mental foibles. And in Mariposa, the Mariposa Treatment is the very beginning of that therapy. And it's a mixed bag, because it's brand new. Mariposa takes away all the stops, all the epigenetic learning that you've been through as a biological organism. PTSD, a major problem of today's world, is simply being treated by Mariposa. Mariposa starts off as a chemistry. What is cancer? Cancer is tissue learning bad habits. Cancer is tissue that has been removed or it's basically had the stops removed from its destiny and becomes immortal or wants to be immortal. And those are epogenetic stops that's clamped on DNA -- on genes. You put a clamp on a gene, and that's the epogenetic information on top of the sequence of the gene. And this is just as important in the body, but also in your personality, in your psychology. Because, as you go through life, the stress built up on you, puts clamps on certain genes. You start to, from birth, organize yourself to fit into the environment which you're in. And if you're in a battle situation or a law enforcement situation with high stress or violence or anything else, after a while, you become locked into a rut of behaviors. And those behaviors [inaudible] Now, the whole sequence of Mariposa is that, in treating cancer, our mad doctor has discovered that you can also stop emotional problems. But in removing the stops of the emotional problems, it turns out you're also taking away the stops of socialization. So there's an element of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You become a Tabula rasa -- a newborn baby with adult emotions and information. The upshot of it all is that Mariposa works sometimes. But, in this novel, it's just the beginning. And the opening chapter is the vice president murders his wife. We have an undercover agent working in Texas from the FBI. And then, we have a security conference in the Los Angeles Convention Center that goes badly wrong. But, in that security conference, you get to look at all of the concerns, the emotions, and the technology of the present day taken, say, humpty umpty years down the road -- just a few years down. The whole notion of 24-hour surveillance and 4K video is just down the road. We can have it. We can put the glasses on and have our lives completely recorded in 4K video -- better than HD. You can have your car set up so that it feeds video to the police if someone's tailgating you. In other words, you have a society with no lubrication allowed whatsoever, because everything can be caught on camera. The cops can't misbehave badly. You can't speed. You can't irritate people. You can't do any of that, because if you do, they'll get you. So the whole idea of freedom becomes less and less tolerant as we move on. Now, the combination of all of these elements leads to a science fiction scenario. And so, I think that technothrillers and science fiction are pretty much the same. Politically, when I wrote Quantico, I thought it was a liberal spree. I thought that I was really coming down hard on the kind of bad rule that we're facing: Putting heavy duty stress on our law enforcement people, on our soldiers, on our army, military. Turned out that conservative websites gave it good reviews and thumbs up, because they thought it was fair and balanced. I must have been doing something wrong. In Mariposa, it's equally fair and balanced. That is, it's another liberal's greed. And the whole message behind it is, Bad Kings Kill the land . If you choose bad leadership -- if you choose not wisely as to who is going to control you -- you face the consequences. And we are, in Mariposa, facing the consequences -- still -- of those years in which we sold our soul to the company store. And we're still facing that, and we will for years to come. If America could be put into receivership financially, what are we going to sell off first? The national parks? The military system? Already we've sold off military training and logistics to private companies. What's the next step? So that's the future I'm looking at. The upside is, this is a hopeful book. None of my books have been dystopias. They're talking about people having a hell of a hard time -- but surviving. And at the end of my novel, my characters all survive. They're all doing well -- except for one thing, they're completely liberated. You have two main characters, Rebecca Rose and my computer programmer, Nathaniel Trace, who has been working on a 'competor,' Bob Jones. Does anybody recognize what I'm paying homage to here -- a worldwide computer system that could control the financial system? It's Bloss Systems, written by D.S. Jones. Nathaniel Trace and Rebecca have one thing in common. They are free of social concern. Whether they be Dr. Jekyll or they be Mr. Hyde, we don't know, but for them, the world is completely fresh and new. And so, I'd like to go on in the next book to describe that world that they see with completely fresh eyes. I'm not sure where the politics are here or the technology or where the genre, boundaries. I don't see any of these things as dividing or stopping me from moving into one territory. But I do know that, in Mariposa, we are now heading into that land of Queen of Angels. And, in fact, in this book, you'll meet the main character of Queen of Angels, which is set in 2047, police detective named Mary Choi. In this novel, she's ____. So we're neatly tying it in. And of course, Queen of Angels leads into Movie Mars, Heads, and Omni Computing and all. [mumbling] I'm having great fun with the book. It's kind of fun to go back and not mash it together, though, they say robots and empires, but to find that it really does go close to the politics I was describing, it appears I was working against in the 1980s are still with me. We haven't solved anything. These are 30-year-old problems. So that's where I'm at with this book. I've got a lot of technological details in here -- biological and programming lines and. [mumbling] Can I answer any questions? Yeah, any questions from out there in the vast ether too. >> [pause] Q Do we need to read the Quantico first before we read this one? A Not really. You'll probably enjoy it if you do, but in this one, the plot of Quantico is kind of a reveal. It's a background that's eventually kind of creates suspense until you know what actually happened. So I've very cleverly set it up so that if you don't read the novel -- but you will get more information. Q So in the books, you seem to present technology -- enabling abilities of technology -- as sort of a risky, but ultimately beneficial, and capable of handling the issues. I'm curious as to what you really believe the chances of technology at solving some of these other very real problems, such as debt and things like that. A National debt? Q As a stand-in for very big problems that we all have? A The national debt, of course, is kind of a psychological, monetary, hormonal problem; isn't it? I mean, money is permission to get working. And the way it's manipulated and hypermanipulated and metamanipulated around the world is very tough to understand except from a biological perspective. It's like a brain trying to find blood sugar. And every so often, it'd have an epileptic seizure. And the blood sugar is allocated in the incorrect ways -- goes to the incorrect areas to solve problems. I think that's what happens when the economy gets filtered. We lose the ability to connect between the symbolic value of money and the ability to get work done. So you have things that are hypervalued, but really aren't. And suddenly, people find themselves with less incentive to do work than they thought they had, and they slow down. They get depressed. How's that not like an organism with blood flow and all of that? So solving that problem is more of a psychological problem than a technological one. And that's really interesting. You could set all the economics in the world to zero if everyone agreed to. And just start over again and say, "Okay, you know." And they've done this in countries that had hyperinflation. Set it all back to zero. Basically reorient, re-naturalize, re-normalize, like quantum mechanics -- if it doesn't work, normalize it. And that's an interesting idea. Other larger problems. Therapy, in Queen of Angels, was designed to remove the last of our medieval variations. You know, if you take a look at a medieval painting or Renaissance painting and look at all these characters with moles and warts and noses and distortions and hunchbacks and everything. We watch the Dutch masters painting their towns and their cities. We realize that today, physically, we're probably better off than them, but mentally, we still have all those warts and all of those bends and problems. Get rid of those, and what do we have? A different society. In Mariposa, we're coming to grips with the early stages of that. What do we want to be? How do we want to define ourselves? How do we want our personal interactions to build? How efficient do we want to be? How sane do we want to be? I mean, again, this notion that we get socialized by clamping down various genes -- acquire an epogenetic veneer -- as we get older, is probably one hundred percent accurate. That's probably what happens to us. And PTSD, under those conditions, is learning bad habits, which work well on the battlefield or in crime situations or in violent situations, but work very poorly when you're at home in bed trying to sleep. All of these things, then, come back to what is our evolution and metaevolution and how do we want to direct ourselves, and again [mumbling] The question -- of whether it'll work or not -- is irrelevant, because of course, sometimes it'll work and sometimes it won't, just like all the technology we use. Technology is a human endeavor. Not doing it is not an issue. We can't stop ourselves from doing it, because we always offer that carrot at the end of the stick, "Okay, things are going to be better." Q My question was more to, What do you actually believe about, you know, the likelihood of beneficial outcomes in the future? A You have it happen all the time. I mean, would you go back to 1924? Q Twenty-four sounds bad, no. [laughter] A What would you go back to? Q If I could get stock in the, well no, '24 wasn't that bad. It was '29 that was bad, so. A Those five years you could have fun. Q Exactly. A You can sell real estate for five more years. Q Just keep looping. A Yep. Q No, I guess it was more like, Do you actually see the future as being that bright, given the -- obviously, technology has gotten us this far. And there are issues, but it seems overall to be a benefit. As a futurist, what do you see in the near future? A What concerns me most right now is, I don't think most people believe there is a future. They don't see any difference or change that will benefit them. And they're afraid nearly all of the time. And so, they go back to the more cozy stuff, which is the more acceptable stuff about zombies and vampires. These are monsters they know. The future is a monster they don't know. And what do they do? They romanticize zombies and vampires. I mean, pretty soon, we're going to have zombie babysitters, if we don't have them already. Kids -- it's going to be like the Frankenstein's monster. It isn't scary anymore. So, we've taken our old monsters and normalized them, and our new monster is the future. And we don't want to know what it is, because we don't know what we want to be. We just don't. America is at a crossroads now. What do you all want to do? Do we want to go back to a Golden Age that never existed? Do we want to move ahead to a liberal view of the world that never worked before? We just don't know. We don't know how to handle our finances, how to handle our freedom, our equalities. And yet, somehow, America always stumbles along. We've been in worse situations. So yeah, I'm optimistic. But think about it, we have been in much worse situations, where our passions have produced extraordinary violence. And Mariposa is about avoiding that, about not allowing people to have their worst passions rule the world. Along the way, that means of course, you got to kick some butt and bring out some pole axes and all that sort of stuff. Q So I got a question. So it seems to me that Axel Price's company is very similar to maybe another company that you might have modeled it on? A Several different companies. Q Yeah, I mean, it's an amalgamation, but the one that stood out for me was Blackwater and even the name is similar to the owner there. And yeah, and so. A It does sounds like a bomb-building prison. Q Yeah, it does. It does. So? A Jonathan Price. Q So, the Blackwater comparison was clear to me, but since it's an amalgamation, what other companies out there is this -- I guess, it's sort of -- dystopian corporation that you're kind of modeling? A Well, you know, I'm thinking of -- all of the service companies that provide services for Washington, D.C. -- and full disclosure, I've received checks from many of them for attending ___ conferences and so on. There'd be KBR, Kellogg, Brown, Route. These companies have always been very helpful in Washington, D.C. in setting up conferences, in providing logistic support, and all sorts of support activity. Where I find them to be less than useful is when they're allowed to kill people without consequences. Soldiers aren't. And that seems dysfunctional to me. Or when we're going to sell off 'death row' to a private company. That I don't want to see. That I think is going much too far, the privatization of security and our armed forces is not a good idea. One, because an army is beholden to the civilians that pay for it. And if you have a firewall between payment, punishment, and performance, and someone can get away with not delivering on their contractual obligations, or violates those contractual obligations, or is never given any obligations under the contract, except vague ones, doesn't work for me. America is about Americans controlling their firepower. It's not about removing your sense of guilt or responsibility by assigning it to somebody else that you can say it was their fault. We should be guilty. Q Does assigning it to someone else sort of open up freedom for Americans in a sense? A How will that be? Q Well, you have freedom if you don't have to think about those things, right? A Yeah, you have freedom of guilt, but if you're guilt-free, you're dysfunctional. You need to be therapied at that one. [laughter] Mariposa is for you. No guilt, no glory. But yeah, I think that that would be one of the reasons people might want to give this up is, they want to live in their BMW, buy their BMW, have their home theater, and never leave the house, because you don't want to pay taxes to -- you don't want to build community. Don't be responsible for community or for country. Patriotism without responsibility or without a sense of country seems to me to be kind of a loose cannon. You have a question? Oh, collating -- still collating. Yeah. Oh, whichever one want to go first, sure. San Francisco. All right. Q Sort of, you have a great breadth of knowledge and even depth into the research here. I was wondering if you could sort of go into what comes first -- your plot or your research? Do you go and read a whole bunch of different things, and then, file them away as sort of, "Oh, I could use this at some point in the future." Or do you weave your plot, and then, sort of go and do deep dives into finding out the specifics on the technologies? A You know, yes on all accounts. I've been privileged to be kind of at the birthry of a lot of these activities in government. So in a sense, 9/11, but even before then, by being in consultation with Sandia, NASA, and NASA administrators working on the Citizens Advisory Committee through the '80s and '90s. Seeing not only how government works, but also how the personalities interact of what people who have been in government. Let's say, the whole cold warriors talk about the Cold War days -- utterly chilling. You know, thank God that went away. But it went away with surprising speed, because the first meeting I had with the Citizens Advisory Counsel was in 1983, Star Wars defense was proposed that same year, Soviet Union started to collapse in 1981. And we could see that there were severe problems, but the reports from the military were that the problems were going to get worse and worse and worse and eventually computers will be controlling the situation. So, that basically inspired me to write Eon, realizing all of those situations and the personalities and the technologies. I had to figure out, What happens if something comes in and interferes? The old story in science fiction was, aliens would unite us. What if an alien opportunity comes in and divides us to the point of driving us to war? Like, you know -- I don't know -- a solid gold meteor landing in the middle of a primitive village. What would you do with it? So yeah, it's a little of both -- all of those things together. And then, later on, coming into Homeland Security, talking at the FBI Academy in Quantico, talking to agents, putting their personalities in place. The stories come later in that case, but some of the research is already there. The impetus. You had a question, sir. Q So, this is a frequently asked question, but How would you recommend getting into writing? You know, it's a nano Rhymo? A You have to write. You know, in your copious spare time. I don't know how many hours you work here -- a lot, I suspect. But in your copious spare time, you have to set aside an hour a day or in the morning before you come in. I know my friend, Joe Haldeman, used to get up very early in the morning and write and then go off and ride a bike and all that sort of stuff for exercise. Yeah. One hour a day, put aside, make sure your family and your work don't interfere with -- and write. And if you write a page a day, you have a novel at the end. Second clue, don't be afraid. You don't have to show it to anybody. Maybe no one will ever see it. But then you write, it's your own personal thing. You try it out. You have fun with it. You relax. And the zen of relaxing is the most important thing. If nobody ever has to see it, you're free. But if at some point, you come along and say, "Well, this is pretty good." Then, you can hand it out to sympathetic friends and relatives. If you don't have people who are supportive, don't hand it out. Just send it straight off to the editor, because if you're going to be rejected, you might as well be rejected by a stranger. Yeah, that's the way to go. Any other thoughts about writing? What are you working on? Q Kind of a future history thing. A That's where we all get started. One of my first ideas as a kid was, "Let's write this future history going out to billions of years of history." It's great fun. Ended up in City at the End of Time. Q Oh, I'm not going that far. A few decades. A No, yeah, exercising and modeling and playing with ideas. It's all great fun. There's no reason you can't just continue to be fun. But also, if you actually get something good, who knows? Other questions? Yes. Q One of the things you were talking about was how the technology is -- to intentionally misparaphrase you -- you were saying how people are enjoying staying home and using their widescreen TV and avoiding the inconvenience of going out and noticing that there is a city out there. In many ways, this is sort of a culture variant back to when the city out there was the culture, because there wasn't much culture you could get at home. So, I suspect what's happened is the economies of scale have made it feasible to create a culture, which is physically nonlocal. But that's driven out of the economy of scale with that sort of cheaper to deliver to people on average than trying to deliver it in a city. Do you see any opportunity for -- it's easy to say 'technology' -- I meant more technology in a sense of the opportunities for the society _____ technology whether technology will remove those economies of scale that's driving the culture away from the cities and essentially make those same communities still there, but they're smaller, so that they -- and you're only localizing them. A We certainly see that in the notion of small, suburban, apartment buildings and malls. Well, your shops are nearby. But I find those areas rather boring. What you want is the unexpected, but what Americans seem to have been trying to go for for the last 20 years is "Only the expected, thank you." No surprises, I want to pay for a uniformity of excellence with no surprises. We see it in our retailing, in our entertainment industry. We are really -- as we try to force ourselves to be more and more uniform. At the same time, we want to be more and more prosperous. When in fact, it seems to me that the most prosperous and successful person out there is the one who's constantly surrounded by good surprises. You can't generate that by having a controlled environment. In a city, a well-ruled city is full of lovely, strained, and sometimes awkward surprises. And that's what makes a biography. My friend Larry Nevin says, "I've got enough money. I just don't have enough memories." I think that's a beautiful philosophy. And memories are not made by uniformity or expected expectations that are fulfilled. They are made by surprises. Any other. As long as not too much surprise. Surprise heading over into technothriller shock, I'd like to avoid too. But on the other hand, I simply like to read about it, so. Q Okay, another question. So I was fascinated by your statement that you felt that your Quantico novel was kind of a leftist screed in a sense. I can see the sort of -- what people traditionally sort of think of as left-oriented themes in Mariposa -- I haven't read Quantico -- but what would you say are the right-leaning themes that you think your readers have sort of grasped on to? A Well, actually, I think it's the characters have their own politics. I don't impose my politics on the characters. Most of my law enforcement characters are, in fact, conservative. Even Rebecca Rose is very kind of hard-bitten law enforcement. And I think that appeals to people rather than having views imposed on psychologies. So I think that's what they're getting. They're getting an honesty of the depiction of the reaction of the characters. As to whether the situation in Mariposa is leftist or not, it certainly criticizes prior administrations. But at this point, the president in Mariposa is a Democrat and she still faces incredible difficulties. And some of them, you know, come from missteps in her own administration. A lot of them come from the past. But that's with all presidencies. Q So what would be like a left view of the government or a right view of government sort of through the eyes of the characters in Mariposa? A I think it'd be more the realization that history still ruled, the passions of history still ruled. And I don't think conservatives would feel at all comfortable with that notion. When we have Axel Price at the end of the book -- I won't spoil too much -- spouting off his philosophy of life, it is I think, you know, a philosophy that many conservatives would find very appealing. And yet, at the same time, you realize he's trying to destroy our nation. Why? Why would he want to do that? What is he reenacting here? Well, he's reenacting a passion of 50 years ago. A resentment that's built up for over centuries. And that's something we usually ascribe to the Middle East. We often say, "The Middle East is a place where history goes to die." They all hate each other. Well, what's going on here? Same thing. So I think that that would be considered to be -- I think some conservatives would resent that assertion. Part of their philosophy is Confederate. On the other hand, the liberals will take no comfort from this book, as I'm saying basically, "We all have to work together here." Not all of the country that's conservative is going to go along with my Bond Billan's attitudes. Who knows what's going to draw us all back together again? But we do need to do that. We do need to come together. And it's possible that this financial situation we're entering will be the equivalent of World War II forcing us to do that. We have a decision to make. Are we going to finance our own country, or are we going to watch it go down the drain -- be owned by foreigners? It's a big decision. >> Any other questions from D.C.? No? Okay. Thank you very much. A My pleasure. Thank you. >> [Applause]