Greg Bear, Hugo and Nebula award winning author of Hull Zero Three, joins us this week on io9's Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast to talk about his novels, working with Neal Stephenson, and the Fermi paradox.
Art by Jamie Jones, from the Mongoliad
The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley.
You can download the MP3 for this episode here, subscribe to The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast feed here, and browse other episodes here.
Read on for this episode's fabulous SHOW NOTES!
0:00 Introduction
0:25 Dave and John introduce the show
Interview: Greg Bear
01:20 Interview begins
01:29 Bear talks about Hull Zero Three, published by Orbit Books
02:05 The science behind Hull Zero Three
02:56 How have real world events developed since Bear wrote Quantico and Mariposa
04:04 The imaginary technologies in Quantico Mariposa
05:30 Bear's collaboration with Neal Stephenson and others on The Mongoliad
07:00 The unusual distribution method of The Mongoliad
07:33 The technique behind medieval sword-fighting and combat
09:43 How to learn to fight with a sword
10:13 Bear's work as a consultant for Government agencies
12:09 What was it like appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart?
13:10 Working in the Halo universe
13:53 The response to his novel Eon
15:53 The Society of Digital Artists challenge artists to illustrate Eon
16:54 Bear's solution to the Fermi Paradox from The Forge of God
18:03 What does Bear think of the <a href="http://www.seti.org/"SETI Institute? Should we announce ourselves to the universe? Or hide from potential threats?
18:36 Bear's involvement in creating the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, Washington
19:05 Expanding into Fantasy and Horror?
20:07 ePublishing and eReaders
21:47 The fiction of Nikos Kazantzakis
23:32 Parallels between Kazantzakis and Olaf Stapledon
25:40 Teaching writing seminars and Terry Brooks' Sometimes the Magic Works
27:13 Writing screenplays and the necessity of a humble attitude
28:17 Some of the lesser known Science Fiction authors who deserve more recognition
29:47 Any recent or upcoming projects from Bear?
31:26 End of interview
31:37 Ad Spot for Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
Dave and John talk about alien invasions
32:36 Alien invasions in Science Fiction
33:45 H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds
34:30 An early example of the "big twist" in popular literature
34:51 Two common patterns in alien invasion stories
35:43 What would aliens think of our anti-alien movies and TV shows?
35:59 War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches
36:53 Big ray-guns vs. mind control. Which is scarier?
38:19 Too many cop-out endings in alien invasion flicks?
39:07 Independence Day. Too goofy?
39:48 Why can't more alien invasion movies have darker endings?
40:20 John Carpenter's The Thing, based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s "Who Goes There?"
42:03 Heinlein's The Puppet Masters
42:43 The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
43:15 Vilcbamba by Harry Turtledove
43:54 Seattle Geekly's conversation about the concept of the "gamemaster"
45:13 So much predictability in today's entertainment
45:40 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the film and the graphic novel
46:50 They Live (film)
47:36 "I have come to kick ass and chew bubblegum…"
48:02 Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson
48:15 Dave can't remember the name of a mysterious (but wonderful) short story. Can you help him remember?
49:16 The boom of recent alien invasion movies: Skyline The Battle of Los Angeles and Monsters
54:48 Ad Spot for Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
55:51 Who didn't want a sword when they were a teenager?
56:40 Records of the Medieval Sword. How heavy is that armor?
59:12 Ordering from the classified ads in "Dragon Magazine"
1:00:12 Training in full plate mail. Not so easy as it seems.
1:01:28 Drowning in plate mail and sweat?
1:02:07 Show wrap-up
Thanks for listening!
John Joseph Adams is an anthologist, a writer, and a geek. He is the bestselling editor of the anthologies By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), Seeds of Change, andWastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse. His most recent books are The Living Dead 2 and The Way of the Wizard, and he is currently assembling several other anthologies, including Brave New Worlds and The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. Barnes & Noble.com named him "the reigning king of the anthology world," and his books have been named to numerous best of the year lists. In addition to his anthology work, he worked for more than eight years as an editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,and is currently the editor of Lightspeed Magazine and Fantasy Magazine.
David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed,Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction,Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he's contributed stories to several of John's anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He's attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn's Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card's Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.
Snownotes compiled by podtern Aidan Moher
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DISCUSSION
If you really want to learn to fight with a sword, you should call ME. I will teach you how to mess suckers up.
(Incidentally, it is not 100% accurate to say that fencing is meant to be like a kind of choreography.)
(I can't find the part where he lists the sources for the medieval swordplay, but I think it'd be a shame if it doesn't include the Walpurgis Manuscript which, among other things, has several sections on absurd duels that Germans fought: for instance, a criminal on trial might be forced to prove his innocence by fighting his accuser in a duel in which one person is in a giant pit and has a mace, while the other person stands on the outside with a sack full of rocks.)