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Author Greg Bear has had and continues to have a prolific and successful career as a sci-fi and fantasy writer. Blood Music is one of his more famous novels and he also helped co-found the San Diego Comic-Con.
2:14 – Greg Bear starts by talking about how he got into writing as a little kid. He talks about all the speculative fiction he was into at the time. He read a lot of paperbacks at the Kodiak base library when he was growing up.
4:02 – He started by trying to write Tom Swift type books and Burroughs type of works.
6:03 – in the 1960s there was a lot more interesting writing coming out and many more interesting writers as well. He started attending sci-fi conventions and meeting writers he liked.
8:26 – Greg Bear talks about how he chooses between making a story a short or turning it into a novel. New York publishers in the 80s were resistant to publishing hard cover science fiction. They turned them into paperbacks.
10:50 – Heinlein loved anyone who had been in the military.
12:18 – Greg Bear talks about his big success in the UK while the same book was sold as a paperbook in the US.
13:30 – Michael Crichton said he didn’t write sci-fi and disparaged it but wrote “techno-thrillers.” Publishers seem to hate genre except for mystery.
15:24 – People in the military love sci-fi but New York is not technically oriented and doesn’t understand sci-fi.
18:04 – A lot of sci-fi writers don’t have steady homes with publishers. Greg Bear has worked on different genres.
19:39 – He’s into every kind of science. He loves studying it all plus politics and military issues. He also loves, mythology, language and history. He’s been writing FBI novels too.
22:53 – Greg Bear talks about the transition from working on typewriters to computers. He also talks about how he tries to please himself in his writing first and hopes he has an audience for it.
24:52 – He’s working on a fantasy novel now.
26:24 – He has a website, GregBear.com and he’s on Facebook too.
Links of interest
For more of “The Art and Design of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Mystery and Horror” please follow me on Facebook at crisalvarezwlc, on youtube at Cris Alvarez and on Instagram @crisalvarezscifi
Guests: Greg Bear
Host: Cris Alvarez
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, writer, novelist, killing tital, hull zero three, Halo, hard sci-fi, military sci-fi
