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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
Greg Bear's fictions insistently stage moments of catastrophic species change, from the early novella Blood Music to the recent sequence of novels about posthuman species emergence, Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children. This essay will examine the array of models for this imagination of transformation, and analyse the kind of narrative propulsion it produces in Bear's work, from catastrophism in evolution theory through to ideas of 'technological Singularity' that emerged in the early 1990s.
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Greg Bear has produced over twenty novels and collections since 1979, garnered multiple science fiction awards, helped invent the imaginative language and conceptual terrain for nanotechnology with Blood Music (1985), and been judged 'one of the dominant writers of the 1980s'. (1) Despite his strong presence in contemporary science fiction, there exists only a small body of critical commentary on his work. Indeed, Bear's name tends to appear in association with his contributions to the nanotech imaginary, or is buried in lists in survey works of SF, mentioned with passing reference (usually to Blood Music alone) on the way to more substantial treatments of his now canonized and more extensively discussed contemporaries--William Gibson or Octavia Butler, for instance. (2)
Perhaps this relative lack of regard for Bear's output arises from an anomaly in how to place his work. Science fiction writing is frequently, and reductively, divided between 'hard' and 'soft' wings, the former emphasizing rigorous technological and scientific extrapolation in blunt, instrumental prose, the latter exploring the subjective reactions to technological change through fore-grounded literary devices. In the 1980s the tendency to map political and ideological stances on to hard and soft SF gained encouragement from the wider context: the end of the post-war consensus, and the political successes of an openly divisive right-wing neo-liberalism in America. In SF, Bruce Sterling argued that cyberpunk was 'an integration of technology and the Eighties counter-culture', suggesting a kind of anarchistic-libertarian, broadly left-leaning stance inherently suspicious of governmental and corporate power, an alignment common to the social criticism of soft SF. (3) William Gibson's short story 'The Gernsback Continuum' charged that the hard American SF tradition that arose in the 1930s with Astounding Science Fiction was a proto-fascist literature. This was the classic avant-garde strategy of declaring war on historical forefathers. In contrast, the right-wing SF associated with Robert Heinlein developed a strong counter-grouping of hard SF on the American West Coast that embraced this tradition: Heinlein (who died in 1988), Jerry Pournelle, and Larry Niven. This group welcomed the election of Ronald Reagan, and particularly the remilitarization of America, heralding aggressive rearmament as an end to the policy of passive acceptance of Cold War nuclear stalemate. A younger generation of West Coast hard-SF writers also emerged at the start of the 1980s, including Gregory Benford.
Confusingly, Greg Bear appeared on both sides of this literary and ideological divide. His short story 'Petra' was included in the 1986 Mirrorshades anthology, and Blood Music has been called 'a foundational cyberpunk text'. (4) Bear's later novels, Queen of Angels (1990) and Slant (1997), have been declared, rather more ambiguously, 'cyberpunk-ish'. (5) Norman Spinrad included Bear in this grouping because Bear's work exemplified 'precisely the acceptance of the technological evolution and alteration of our definition of our humanity, the romantic acceptance of the technological alteration of the species, rather than the more traditional posture of cautionary warnings'. (6) These fictions attempted to articulate the impossible: the subjective experience of becoming posthuman. This paradoxical endeavour, told through densely layered, crosscutting narrative strands, was a rather soft concern, unsurprisingly perhaps from a Literature major who read Joyce and Conrad at San Diego University. A proper hard-SF writer would surely agree with Heinlein that such modernism was best discarded as 'a sick literature' compared with the rude vitality of SF. (7)
At the same time, however, Bear was involved in Jerry Pournelle's Citizen Advisory Panel on National Space Policy, a group which included Heinlein, Niven, and Benford and which delivered a report entitled Mutual Assured Survival to Reagan in 1984 arguing for the imperative to militarize space and pursue Project High Frontier (this soon transmogrified into the Strategic Defence Initiative or 'Star Wars'). Traditional SF writers might be expected to concur with the injunction that 'we will cease to be a leading world power when we no longer have the ability or the will to explore the frontier of space', (8) but this was wedded to a Hobbesian view of perpetual violent struggle for supremacy; and further Advisory Panel documents were issued in Pournelle's There Will Be War anthologies, interleaved with military SF, denunciations of East Coast liberals, and rousing Kipling soldiering verse. Greg Bear not only signed the 1984 report, but added a short appendix entitled 'Conversion' in which he offered himself as typical of many 'educated modern liberals' who had long advocated civilian-only use of space. He was a convert to militarization presumably because this would accelerate the space technology, and this was married to an evocation of a transcendent future typically associated with the eschatology of Arthur C. Clarke: 'We must survive into adulthood,' Bear said, 'and inevitably that adulthood will be spent in space.' (9) With texts like Eon (1985) and The Forge of God (1987), Bear could therefore also be regarded as 'one of SF's current hard science masters'. (10) Bear decided that 'it was a mistake for Bruce [Sterling] to bring me into the so-called cyberpunk fold', (11) regarded questions of the academic literary value of SF as unimportant, attacked those in the New Wave from the 1960s for their 'sociological attitude which regarded thinking big as imperialist', (12) and apparently held that properly scientific fictions could stand outside politics. These are all classically hard-SF views.
My interest in Bear lies partly in his very failure to fit these taxonomic categories of conventional SF criticism. Bear is a perfect instance of the hybridization of genre that partly comes from a recognition of the social, economic, and cultural embeddedness of any scientific practice. His novella Heads (1990) explicitly thematized the impossibility of holding the laboratory aloof from political machinations. This vision, which does not regard nature and society (or science and fiction) as mutually exclusive, antipathetically defined spheres of influence, but as imbricated from the very beginning in a complex network of interconnections, means that the taxonomic divide (and ideological war) of hard and soft SF needs to be fundamentally displaced when considering his work. As Bruno Latour has done for science studies, so Bear's fiction offers the opportunity to trace the networks that connect together wildly diverse hard and soft things: laboratories, parliaments, machine intelligence, galaxies, bedrooms, spaceships, survivalists, mitochondrial DNA, American presidents, geologists, viruses, high-tech start-up capitalists, the undead, the posthuman, and the alien. (13) Darren Harris-Fain has been acute in observing that Blood Music is 'filled up with shifts and transformations of various types', starting out as a Frankenstein gothic of scientific overreaching, crossing to medical thriller, body horror, and disaster novel before emerging as a near religious mystical vision. (14) More recently, Bear has written hybrid fictions out of the precise collision between hard scientific speculation and its complex soft social and political implications--as in Darwin's Radio (1999) and Darwin's Children (2003). The generic cross-fertilization has also accelerated, as in the techno-gothic Dead Lines (2004) or the wig-out technoscientific-gothic-political-conspiracy-thriller Vitals (2002), a novel that defies categorization.
All this suggests an out-of-control proliferation of hybrid forms, but the diversity of Bear's fiction can be linked together by one persistent concern: catastrophe. His novels repeatedly stage moments of the end or catastrophic transformation of humanity, from nuclear war, alien invasion, and biotechnological reinvention to evolutionary catastrophism, bioterrorism, and the return of the dead, the genre morphing in keeping with the imagination of disaster. Disaster fiction is inherently reiterative: it is caught in the paradox of trying to write out precisely what escapes writing. Like an unassimilated traumatic event, it prompts compulsive attempts at retrospective or prospective narrative mastery. As Maurice Blanchot puts it: 'The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience--it is the limit of...
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