"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl

In an interview with Technovelgy.com, Greg Bear had this to say about Max Detention:

Technovelgy: Let me ask about Max Detention - you had a lot of fun with that.

Greg Bear: [Laughs] "A little bit of satire there. Following what's happened with habeus corpus and so on, I think we are going to look at a period of time when the Federal detention systems could get a little bit gnarly. It's certainly bad in Gitmo, but what if it were to extend to local jurisdictions, which has been requested. This is what they would like to do. Is it a good thing? Perhaps not. So I do satirize it a little bit. Although I do think this computer 'Max Headroom' is perhaps better than some public defenders. And maybe more reliable."

T: This may be a personal question, but are you opposed to the idea of Gitmo-style detention centers where people just disappear for years?

GB: "In terms of public relations alone, it's a disaster. It removes our high profile as a moral nation. It's reprehensible, it's not effective, I don't see anything coming out of it, it's bad planning and the fact is that the Geneva convention was signed by many, many countries for the basic reason that it helps protect your [own] troops.

Violations of the Geneva convention during WWII were vigorously prosecuted. Now we stand aside and say that we do not need to be a part of the international community? I can't see where that makes any sense.

There's this "24 hour" scenario where the guy knows where the nuclear weapon is and you have to torture him to get the information out of him. As the British will tell you, and the people who are tortured will tell you, that's not very effective. People will say anything, and how will you judge that information? When you torture someone and they've given you information, you have no way of judging its veracity. You may have people who've been trained to give you the same story.

You can't trust [these prisons] to be self-accountable, you can't believe the information, you can't trust your government and if you can't trust your government you can't trust law enforcement."

(Read the rest of Greg Bear's interview on Quantico.)