Heads

A guy is trying to lower the temperature of matter to absolute zero in a controlled environment, his wife decides to use some of the decidedly cold space in his lab to store a few hundred heads from the bankruptcy sale of one of those companies Timothy Leary ended up in, and people freak out.

There's not a whole lot to say about this one - the Big Reveal is so obvious that I had been anticipating it ever since conflict started, and the events at the end were of the "well duh, what did you *think* would happen" variety. Which is not really a flaw in the novel, as it means the author realistically depicted how these events would play out and it is only the characters who are clueless, but it is not that entertaining either.

The big surprise show more with this novel is the evisceration of, shall we saw, Elron Hoover's First Church of Appliantology:

Here was a creed without a coherent philosophy - a system without a sensible metaphysics. Here was puerile hypothesis and even outright fantasy masquerading as revealed truth.

This is particularly interesting because, while the "church" harrassment of critics was in full swing when this novel was written, it was only in 1993 (a full year later) that Steven Fishman released documents in court that publicly revealed just how ludicrous the purported religious doctrine actually was. South Park famously skewered these beliefs some ten years later, but Greg Bear seems to have been ahead of the curve here. As usual. show less

My reaction to reading this book in 1992. Spoilers follow.

A tale of Bear’s that mixes religion and politics to good effect.

I liked the central point that even libertarian minded scientists, businessmen, and technicians who despise administrators and politicos have to pay attention to politics – not only the external threat of foreign governments but the ability of a government to hold a community together, to help it resolve disputes between citizens. The lunar syndicates learn that politics “is the art of avoiding disasters, of managing difficult situations for the benefit of all” in their political fight against a domineering Earth and the Church of Logology.

The Church is quite obviously based on L. Ron Hubbard’s movements show more and Mormonism, a satire against both. The Mormon parallel is founder K. D. Thierry being handed a crystal rock by a huge female figure (the “last of the True Human”). The rock is supposedly encoded with the secrets to free the mind and body from its shackles (like Dianetics). Like Hubbard, Thierry expounds his doctrines with many books while wondering about the world and eventually retreats into seclusion. Like Hubbard, Thierry sponsers a contest for budding Lit Vid stories. Linking these two is an eerie program by one of the moon syndicates to interrogate some severed heads for archaeological knowledge. (Cryonics was popular in the early twenty-first, but no one figured out how to thaw them out, so – and I liked this feature – keeping the frozen corpsicles around became a real nuisance. They’re frequently sold.) Specifically, the head of one Thierry. The Church of Logolists objects strongly, eventually turning to violence to stop the program. The project is partially run by the strange artificial intelligence QL (for quantam) – built by a singular Chinese genius. The QL works beyond regular logic and in the post Boolean realm, completely in tune with the “Planck-Wheeler” continum. (Bear is a master of creating plausible sounding history, science, and technologies with just a few words.).

The ending was weakened a bit by the almost mystical violation of time and space, the creepy speaking of the dead frozen heads to our narrator. Still, Bear does a nice job melding science, religion, and politics. show less

I read this novella because of the premise: some lunar colonists come into possession of a bunch of cryogenically-preserved heads, from an Alcor-like foundation. Can they figure out a way to read the memories of those colonists? I've been reading sf stories about life extension technologies for a class I'm guying to teach. Well, this book has very little to say about its actual premise, as it mostly focuses on largely uninteresting and seemingly over-simplistic politics on the Moon. There's also some Scientology satire; maybe this would have felt fresher in 1991, but thirty years on it's pretty dull stuff. The revelation about why the Scientologists don't want the heads revived is blindingly obvious, but takes the protagonists a hundred show more pages to catch up to the reader on. I guess this is set in the same milieu as Bear's Moving Mars, but that was a much better book. show less

A short book by Bear - more of a novella, really. The moon has been colonized, and society has developed into a clanlike structure of family/companies. On one of these, a man is working on scientific experiments to try to achieve absolute zero, which he believes would result in phenomena interesting to physics. His sister comes across an opportunity to acquire a batch of frozen heads, cryonically preserved in centuries past by those hoping for future resurrection. This seems unlikely, but she hopes to be able to use new techniques to reads some of these heads' preserved memories, to study anthropologially. Clinching the deal is that two of the individuals wetre the founders of their clan.
Unfortunately, unbeknownst to them, another of show more the heads is that of the founder of a powerful religious group (bearing more than a passing resemblance to Scientology), and that group will do anything to stop the transfer of heads from happening...
Pretty good sci-fi, the ending is a bit overblown, however. show less

A short novel, with much less complexity than #1--William is trying to produce absolute-zero, his wife, Rho, has purchased 400+ corpsicles (who will never be resuscitated) and Micky is trying to coerce enough money to support both their efforts. The plot revolves around a) what will happen when/if they produce 0-degrees; b) can they read the minds of the frozen heads; c) how can they survive the attempts of a politically powerful religious cult that is intent on destroying the entire family.

what was the point this book is trying to make? I cannot say.