Greg Bear

What on Earth is Neal Stephenson’s Mongoliad?

On Tuesday, San Francisco peeps will get their first glimpse of the Mongoliad, a serialized story created by Neal Stephenson and written by Stephenson, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland and others. And it’s an experiment in “post-book story-telling.” What exactly is the Mongoliad, and what is it about? We’re not sure, but whoever’s in San Francisco…

The Future Of Short Fiction Publishing: Pay Per Story?

The iPad and other devices may have revolutionized the short story publishing market, judging from a new announcement by Orbit Books. The genre publisher, whose authors include Iain M. Banks and Gail Carriger, is going to start publishing its authors’s short fiction electronically — but Orbit’s not going the Tor route, where stories are posted…

Your Favorite SF Author Is Making The World A Safer Place

Sci-fi writers shaping US national security policy may sound like the stuff of comics, but it turns out that it’s also happening in real life, as well. Be very afraid. https://gizmodo.com/unthinkable-adds-even-more-conspiracy-to-a-post-9-11-wo-5247663 The Washington Post reported on the recent 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference, where sci-fi authors like Greg Bear and Catherine Asaro…

Greg Bear Solves Halo’s Greatest Mystery

We’re finally going to learn more about Halo’s mysterious Forerunners, at the hands of a master. Hugo- and Nebula-winning author Greg Bear is writing a new Halo trilogy. According to a press release from Tor Books: The first novel in this new trilogy will be published in early 2010. An unabridged audiobook edition will publish…

Two major newspapers turned their eye to science fiction books over the weekend: The Washington Post featured lit-blogger Edward Champion’s roundup of recent books, including Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest, Nancy Kress’ Dogs and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King And Other Stories. And the London Times reviewed some books, including Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Greg…

7 Totally AWESOME Theories Of Evolution From Scifi

If Ben Stein really wants to convince us all that evolution is a crock, he doesn’t need to make a documentary and play semantic games with Richard Dawkins. He just has to sit us down and make us watch this episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where traveling at super-warp speed causes Janeway and Paris to…

Your Face Cream Will One Day Eat The World

Artificial intelligences aren’t going to take over Earth by building a bunch of robotic fashion models to karate-chop us to death. Instead, the A.I. takeover will come from a nasty nano-tech sludge that consumes all matter in its path to recreate itself endlessly. This “gray goo” scenario has popped up in novels by Walter Jon…

Science Fiction Farts of Death

Fart danger is everywhere recent science fiction. First there was Greg Bear’s novel Vitals, in which an evil Soviet conspiracy leads to targeted biological mind-control attacks. How do you know somebody has been taken over by mind-controlling bacteria? They start farting. Doctor Who took this idea a step further. In “Boom Town,” which aired during…

Cop Block Comes To OnStar

SF writer Greg Bear, author of classics like Darwin’s Radio and Blood Music, wrote a novel that predicted yesterday’s announcement from OnStar that they would be installing systems that allow police to shut your car down. The OnStar system is called “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown,” and when activated would slow down and stop a moving car…