Heads

Bear goes beyond the petty accelerations of the future which inspire lesser writers, and takes huge, intuitive and intelligent leaps FEAR Glorious...The very model of a modern hard science-fiction writer, creating visions the like of which have never been known INTERZONE Since his 1986 Hugo win for Blood Music Greg Bear has been notorious for massive and ambitious novels of hard science fiction. The unusually slim Heads is part of a loose "future history" sequence beginning with Bear's Queen of Angels. It's set on the colonised 22nd-century Moon where scientist Pierce hopes to outwit the third law of thermodynamics and bag the Nobel Prize by reaching absolute zero temperature. His AI assistant, an advanced "Quantum Logic thinker", predicts that matter itself may enter unknown states at true zero. Meanwhile Pierce's refrigerated lab, the Ice Pit, seems just the place for his family company to store 410 frozen human heads (including family members) left over from the abandoned dream of cryonic immortality. There's even a chance that new scanning techniques could read these brain s' frozen memories. Bad news: one head belongs to the sinister founder of a cult--clearly modelled on L Ron Hubbard--and the powerful Logology movement will stop at nothing to keep those particular thoughts secret. Much tense politics follows. A sabotage attempt triggers the eerie climax as matter, bodies, souls and strange new quantum states flow together in the flux of absolute zero and the Ice Pit becomes a Fortean mystery. Bear blends scientific and mystical unknowns very neatly in this short but effective novel. David Langford, AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW