reg Bear is unquestionably one of the leading figures in contemporary SF. In 22 novels and three major collections, he has fused informed and inspired scientific speculation with visionary inquiry into the biological, social and psychological roots and potentials of the human species, and while writing tales that apparently fit within the parameters of this or that subgenre, he has consistently transcended any such limits. In thus expanding the SF envelope, his profound grasp of evolutionary and exotic detail and his talent for sympathetic characterization have been invaluable. And there is often present in his work a sense of cosmic depth, an apocalyptic poetry or rhetoric of transformation that points inexorably to what we must become.
Bear's early novels were exercises in high imaginative aspiration that, despite some technical limitations, very definitely prefigured the achievements of his mature works. Hegira (1979), Beyond Heaven's River (1980) and Strength of Stones (1981) are entries in a space-operatic future history that ranges in focus from mere centuries hence to the end of time itself. Psychlone (1979) ventures into technological horror; The Infinity Concerto (1984) and The Serpent Mage (1986), later combined as Songs of Earth and Power, are striking fantasies that conclude Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and discuss the mechanics of world creation; Corona (1984) is one of the more impressive Star Trek novels. These books, most of them since revised in varying degrees, form the record of a promising genre journeyman; the Master was not long in emerging.
Two novels marked this transition: Blood Music (1985), a potent exploration of how the very small might assimilate the very large, and Eon (1985), which introduces humans of the near future to the tunnel their descendants have driven to infinity. This epic of the "Way" continues still more apocalyptically in Eternity (1988). The Forge of God (1987) brings home with savage irony the lethal dangers of Earth's galactic neighborhood; its sequel, Anvil of Stars (1992), narrates claustrophobically a belated vengeance by the remnant of humanity.
In the 1990s, Bear built with remarkable versatility on this foundation. He brought acute sociological insights to his contrasting portraits of cosmopolitan Earth (in Queen of Angels [1990] and Slant [1997]) and of frontier communities on the Moon (in Heads [1990]) and on Mars (in Moving Mars [1993]), the interactions of these cultures proving revelatory and devastating. Legacy (1995) is a planetary romance of forceful grimness set against the same general background as Eon; Dinosaur Summer (1998) is something of a holiday excursion by comparison, telling nostalgically of the adventures of a boy and his father among dinosaurs; and Foundation and Chaos (1998) recontextualizes the events of the introductory episode of Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
Bear's works from the last few years cogently explore evolutionary themes through the medium of the near-future thriller. Darwin's Radio (1999) sets out a vision of evolution having its painful but purposeful way with the human race, and of society's equally painful response; Darwin's Children (2003) narrates the long hard years of America's adjustment to the presence of the new, strange and hopeful branch of the human species conceived in the previous novel. The unrelated but thematically similar Vitals (2002) considers the biological origins of Death, and the excruciating dangers of any quest for immortality. Together, these three novels speculatively revolutionize our understanding of natural selection and thus of how the natural world organizes itself.
I interviewed Greg Bear by e-mail in February 2003, some months after the appearance of his massive Collected Stories (2002), and on the eve of publication of Darwin's Children.
As we commence this interview, the Columbia shuttle disaster hangs gloomily over America, and over SF's agenda of space travel. How do you evaluate this event and its consequences?
Bear: We've been squeezing NASA and the shuttle program for decades. For various reasons, we've shut down programs to design and fly new kinds of vehicles to replace the aging space shuttles. The shuttles are marvels of technology, but they're old and complicated and we need something newer, simpler and safer. Unfortunately, the American public is unwilling to spend the money necessary to safely maintain humans in space, and in a time of deficits and threats of war, I'm afraid the Columbia failure is going to be a major blow. We have to pull back and ask ourselves if we want to continue doing manned space exploration in the expectation that more crews will die simply because we're too damned cheap. And I'm hoping the long-term answer is a recommitment to vision, safety and excellence.
In 2003, you stand at a mature pinnacle of your career. You've published numerous bestselling novels; you have a big film deal in the offing; your Collected Stories volume appeared last year, a testament to your canonical status within SF; and your new book, Darwin's Children, is a fine sequel to Darwin's Radio, which not long ago won the Nebula Award. How do you feel about all this success?
Bear: While I appreciate the kind words, I have to say that pinnacles come and pinnacles go. You either freeze at the top or you walk or roll down! If I don't keep standing on tiptoe and chasing new ideas and compelling stories, I could end up a has-been or, worse, bored. I'm fortunate as a writer in having a solid group of readers who tolerate my foibles and seem willing to follow me into new territories; they're my greatest strength. I owe them all.
Inevitably, a lot of excitement attends your movie deal, a project to film The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. How did this initiative begin, and how does it presently stand?
Bear: Some years back, Vince Gerardis and Ralph Vicinanza opened an office in Los Angeles to offer a wide range of literary science-fiction properties to Hollywood. Vince in particular was taken with my novels The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. He made them the focus of an extraordinary years-long effort to put together a viable package—an enthusiastic screenwriter willing to work on spec, initially, and a production company or studio willing to go to the mat for an expensive and difficult project.
Vince gave screenwriter Ken Nolan a copy of The Forge of God, and he read it just before flying off to Morocco to work with Ridley Scott on Black Hawk Down. That year-long effort gave Ken time to think through an approach, and on his return to the U.S. he put together an 80-page scriptment—basically, a long treatment with integrated dialogue, but not yet a finished screenplay. The week after I read this document—which was terrific—Warner Brothers made an offer none of us could refuse. We're now in the stages of screenplay completion. It's tremendously exciting to have a project being developed and scripted at this level, with this degree of talent. So far, the first movie is being scripted and not the second, but characters from Anvil are in place to bridge to a possible second film.
And ultimately, if the plan reaches fruition, a trilogy of films will be produced. Will you be writing a third book in the Forge series as a basis for the (possible) concluding film?
Bear: I'll be giving it serious thought in the coming months. Having Forge of God get a director and a studio green light for production—you saw the green light itself in the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie, very impressive—will push a number of buttons here in Seattle and in New York, and then there can be a more definite answer to your question.
The emphasis of your recent SF has been solidly on terrestrial biology, its menacing and its transcendent potentials. Earlier works, such as Blood Music and Legacy, pointed strongly to your interest in this area; but why such a concentrated exploration of it now—three major novels in succession?
Bear: Modern biology is experiencing an incredible growth of information, but theory is lagging—in part because of a relatively conservative scientific culture. The end of old ways of thinking and the beginning of new theories is an exciting time, and over the last 20 years I've discovered I have a propensity for biology and biological theorizing—on what I semi-humbly call the crackpot level. I read journals, texts and talk to scientists and suddenly my mind is racing, picking through this field of odd facts, assembling key bits with other key bits, coming up with conclusions that seem to me inevitable. Others don't agree, and that's the fun of it. I've had tremendous and invaluable support and encouragement and argument from biologists and scientists in other disciplines. It's been a grand time. Every day, the newspaper headlines read like old science fiction stories.
A comprehensive thesis concerning evolutionary biology seems to be emerging from your novels, somewhat at odds with Darwinian orthodoxy. In summary, how do you envision the process—even the purpose—of evolution?
Bear: Evolution is about solving problems—and anticipating problems—on the level of species or large groups of organisms. A key idea in my work is the distributed network—genes and cells on one level, organisms within a species on a higher level, organisms within an ecosystem on a higher level still—that in patterns of communication, organization and behavior adapts to overcome challenges in the environment, or even to modify the environment. Simply put, these processes make up a kind of thought. There's nothing intrinsically different between an ant colony interacting to solve problems and a cluster of neurons in our brains. They're both networks, and they both work to solve problems to gain access to more resources for the colony or the brain's body.
Neo-Darwinian theory asserts that the only possible mutation in an organism, the only alteration in its DNA that can produce a phenotypic variation, is a random mutation. We know today that random factors are not the sole causes of mutation in genes and in phenotypes, so this idea is simply wrong. It's been falsified. This is not to say that Darwinism on the whole is dead—far from it. We are simply beginning to understand the causes of variation. Organisms seem to engage in coherent and repeatable patterns of evolutionary change. Insect wings, for example, can evolve, "devolve," and re-evolve over and over again—something impossible in standard evolutionary theory. These mechanisms point to a kind of linguistic or syntactical evolution, mixing and matching the appropriate verbs and nouns and sentences and even essays of organic design. "Grammatical" designs that have been proven to work together and make sense, to work before, are conserved because they pass muster more often on the world stage. They can contribute to new varieties of organism. Randomness contributes a lot, of course—think of it as the slam poetry of evolution—but it is not the only cause, by a long shot.
If, as you theorize, Earth's biosphere is composed of neural networks, of many levels of "mind," if not of consciousness as we understand it, what is the place of human self-awareness in the scheme?
Bear: For years now, I've claimed that we're the Earth's gonads. We also appear to be a highly specialized set of eyes attached to a brain that loves to leap. We're looking outward and scanning the skies before we take some very risky and dangerous steps into the environment beyond Earth. All of our energy and creativity has been focused on exploring, expanding and conquering unfriendly new territories. We are all travelers, curious and involved in new things. As well, we are a huge and complex group of social animals—which means part of our expanded toolkit of thought is self-awareness, a kind of social interface that allows us to model the behavior of others, and our own behavior in groups. This is what Western culture calls will. Self-awareness gives us a tremendous and sometimes dangerous focus, and like most great tools, it sometimes gets in our way of actually observing reality and seeing what's going on around us. Will leads to ego, which is a tough wall to jump over, since it seems a thing in itself, and worse still, the very most important thing. In fact, we are not pure will, and our bodies are composed of many minds. But that's another essay. ...
Would it be fair to see Darwin's Radio, Vitals and Darwin's Children as variations on your grand biological theme—first evolutionary promise, then evolutionary menace, finally a sober synthesis of the two?
Bear: That's a pretty fair and descriptive take on the three. I think of Vitals as a warning; too much ego and self-indulgence could lead to individual humans becoming the equivalent of tumor cells. More often than not, I've encouraged scientific research and new ideas about human mentality and biology; but on this one issue, I've finally taken a conservative stand, based on a solid biological metaphor. Without major safeguards, and a considerable dose of both wisdom and humility, the quest for immortality could turn into a major problem in decades to come. The fear factor in Vitals is woven into the convolutions of history, science and the text itself; I call it the most paranoid conspiracy novel ever written. As such, it may seem to be more like Michael Crichton jamming with Robert Ludlum, with Richard Condon on drums, than my earlier novels, but sometimes even great visionary scientists need to observe caution.
The premise of Darwin's Radio, the emergence of a new branch of genus homo in a single generation, is one often treated in SF before—Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke and Nancy Kress have been among the more memorable contributors to the tradition. Did you conceive of Darwin's Radio as a definitive, or revisionist, variation on the concept?
Bear: A bit revisionist. Many stories about the Next Human Race involve either extraordinary mental growth (big pulsing brains) or psychic powers (antennae) or some other massive expansion of a limited number of basic attributes. What we see in the evolutionary record, however, is baby steps toward improvements in communication and manipulation of tools, which in turn lead to refinements in brain architecture. Contrary to popular belief, Neanderthals in many cases had brain sizes equal to or even larger than ours. Let's get outrageously sexist and say, truthfully, that to make this statement work we have to compare male Neanderthals with female Homo sapiens sapiens. The point is—it's not about bigger brains. It's about improving bandwidth between communicating individuals, and thereby expanding opportunities and designs for human societies.
In both Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children, you depict the ordinary reaction of Homo sapiens to the appearance of a "successor species" as one of blind prejudice and panic. Is this reaction natural, or is it entirely negative, politicized herd behavior?
Bear: I can't say this is a fair description of the situation in the novels. What I describe is process—hideous, cruel, but unavoidable—and pretty much universal in history and nature. Whatever is new is tested to the breaking point, including our normal children. While many individuals experience prejudice and blind panic, that's true today in such matters as race relations and political discourse between humans of the same type. How much more intense will this be when the humans think and look and behave in substantially different ways? Worse still, the biology of speciation in Darwin's Radio leads to the real possibility of interspecies biological warfare—the triggering and recombination of ancient viruses. It's an incredibly challenging mix for us poor humans.
In all three recent novels, but most overtly in Darwin's Children, you evince a deep distrust of institutionalized political processes. Is this a reflection of your general principles, and—in particular—your response to the current state of politics and government in America?
Bear: In politics as well as in biology, answers arrive through a tug between challenge and acceptance—between competition and cooperation. We solve large-scale problems by hashing things out in dialogue and conflict, making and unmaking laws, and sometimes in fighting, even war. All these processes have the ultimate goal of settling major problems on the scale of cultures and finally the human species. Cruel? You bet. But if you saw how cruel and frustrating the daily life of a neuron in your brain was, you'd be astonished.
The health of political process can be measured by diversity of opinion leading through debate to unity of action, to work getting done and problems being solved. Political process becomes distinctly unhealthy when top-down management is locked in place, debate is stifled and the free flow of information is discouraged.
For the New Children in Darwin's Children, fitting in requires struggle and conflict—and that's both unfair and necessary. They're proving themselves on the world stage.
Currently, the United States is reluctantly assuming the role of the world's greatest superpower. I don't trust the Bush administration—or the Republican Party as currently configured—to understand how to do this properly. They're the wrong people at the wrong time, with the wrong instincts. While I was writing Darwin's Children, I sometimes felt as if the world was doing my research for me—in real time. What I wrote in the novel about giving up on constitutional freedoms to regain a false sense of security began to be enacted in the headlines. It was and is scary.
A fresh direction in your work is the secret history—the hidden evolutionary and co-operative behaviors of past hominid species in Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children, the more immediate patterns of covert research and conspiracy in Vitals. Have you declared authorial war on historical appearances?
Bear: If I'm declaring war on anything or anyone, it's on ignorance, arrogance and presumption. We don't know a hell of a lot about human evolution, and there's a lot more to be learned. To assume we already have all the answers and should not engage in further exploration or speculation is pissing on tree trunks to the nth degree. All I try to do in my books is wipe away a few piss marks and suggest all of us can aim higher.
There's clearly a lot of intellectual joy in being unorthodox, or heterodox. For example, in Darwin's Children you have great fun tracing an original colonization of much of the Americas by aboriginal Australians long before the present Native Americans arrived. Is lateral thinking essential to any enlightenment or progress?
Bear: In science-fiction writing, it's essential. The extent to which we don't look beyond current scientific thinking is the extent to which we deny our mandate, which is to outrage and stimulate.
We find racially diverse skeletons in North America that are 10,000 or more years old. In South America, we've found human artifacts dating back 30,000 years. In Australia, human remains have been found dating back 60,000 years. When the Asiatic ancestors of the present Native Americans arrived is unknown—but it may have been tens of thousands of years earlier than most scientists currently recognize—and they appear very different from the Tierra del Fuegans seen by Darwin at the tip of South America. What about those who came before? As Thomas Mann has pointed out, even the near past is impossibly deep. It's not much of a stretch to suggest that humans and human ancestors have been walking, climbing and even floating for many tens of thousands of years. Human remains are very fragile, as are any artifacts made of skin or wood.
That being said, when making speculations like this, we have to be very, very sure we have done all the necessary research and observed all the necessary marker posts, just to get a better sense of which researchers had it essentially right, and which are way off course. That's a great challenge and loads of fun. In some instances, writers can actually become part of the Great Debate. I've been fortunate in this regard; my current status has been upgraded to gadfly.
Darwin's Children has a qualifiedly happy ending, an air of idealism necessarily tempered by realism. Is there a possibility of the Darwin's series being extended further?
Bear: It's very likely. We have yet to set Stella Nova loose on the world stage. She is her mother's and father's daughter, whatever her differences.
Another recent book is your massive Collected Stories. It's an extremely impressive volume, exhibiting particular strength at novella length. Does the publication of such a definitive collection mark an effective end to your engagement with short fiction, or will you still undertake stories from time to time?
Bear: There's at least one short story not yet published. I just have to get off my duff and send it out. For now, as for the last 20 years, my output of short stories is subservient to writing these whopping big novels.
Having assembled your Collected Stories, have you identified any personal favorites amongst the two dozen or so items gathered?
Bear: I like my fantasies because they're rare and they allow me a lovely kind of freedom. More than half my library is devoted to history and myth and religion, and I love to browse and dream through those stacks.
Looking ahead: in addition to the film trilogy, what can we expect from you next? Although you've been working consistently in near-future thriller mode for a while now, your versatility is legendary.
Bear: Next up is a high-tech ghost story. I hope to write the scariest and most disturbing ghost novel ever, while at the same time introducing a hint of metaphysical optimism. I'm rereading Shirley Jackson and M.R. James and Richard Matheson and Stephen King and Kingsley Amis and half a dozen other masters even now. ...
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Also in this issue:
Doug Naylor of Red Dwarf
