Greg Bear has died
file770.com
file770.com
I first came across Greg Bear reading his short story Petra in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology[1]. I still have the book and just took that quote from it.
I found it mind bending when I first read it.
As a kid brought up as a Catholic I was told that the world exists because of God never stops thinking about us. Regardless of if we believe in God, God believes in us and that's the important thing.
So teenage me, obsessed with hard SciFi and Cyberpunk in particular, runs bang into Petra.
It's a story about a world where God has died. With no supreme being to hold the world in its mind the rules of reality break down.
It was such a crazy concept and it came just at the right time in my life. As an adult, I no longer believe in the supernatural but I still remember the illicit feeling of reading Petra back when I did and it definitely changed me.
RIP Greg, you were brilliant!
In the story, autonomous mobile cities designed to last a very long time begin to fail. GB shows a profound understanding of human society and the bemusement of people who believe they have design a solution well.
I have a work-in-progress PDF edition of it on GitHub here: https://github.com/jdonland/mirrorshades
Advance directives are important; my wife and I have long had them. I've said many times to our adult kids that I want family resources to be put to better use than just keeping me alive on life support when realistically there's little hope of recovery.
https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/advance-care-planning-health-...
Whenever I see his name, I'm transported back to a small town public library in the UK where his novel, Eon and its Arthur C. Clarke nomination took me from a young boy reading more popularist Sci-Fi authors straight into a much harder world of sci-fi authors and it left a huge impression.
Another big loss to the Sci-Fi literary community.
Likewise. I've used it to introduce many people to more serious sci-fi.
</3
Are his other books like that too? Or is the tone a little less murderous?
Also from the view point of SETI there is the awful truth that we really shouldn’t be trying to communicate w/ other life because the most practical meaningful form of interstellar communication is bombing with relativistic or sub-relativistic projectiles. See The Killing Star where aliens watched Star Trek: The Original Series and thought we might be dangerous, then saw Star Trek: The Next Generation and realized they could take us.
I think that was my favorite part of the Three Body Problem. The "F You" attitude it has toward optimism, individuality, liberty.. haha
Greg Bear was the first person who really made me understand time slowing down as speed increases in Anvil of Stars.
Also the destruction of earth in “The Forge of God” was so visceral that I was depressed in a dark place for days after finishing it.
Not to mention one of the few authors who very well explained the role of bacteria and viruses in very entertaining and hard sci-fi believable fashion.
RIP.
For me it was Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
He really helped me soar among the stars. Thank you Greg Bear, rest easy now.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.0...
"Ideal blood pressure targets to reduce risk of aortic dissection may be even lower than the threshold of hypertension."
Blood tends to clot at lower velocity.
I had an ascending aortic dissection in 2009, so this his different, I guess.
"Care to read it again?"
Goodbye, Greg Bear. May there be a hand held out in darkness for you.
(Edit: Not to belittle Bear if you grouped him with them on the quality of his writing rather than contemporaneity)
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Science_Fictio...
Also, I think we're transitioning into yet another new age of scifi that is post-cyberpunk; smaller in nature, less grandiose, less "living amongst the stars and living a space opera", less "living in a dystopia with extra steps", more "the AI winter will never end and we have to live with the promise never being delivered" and more "oops, we left someone behind on Mars and now he has to eat potatoes to survive". Whatever this new era will be called, it started roughly in the early 2000s, starting when the classic scifi era ended, overlapping with the middle of the cyberpunk era.
You should read his most recent book Project Hail Mary then. It's a much grander concept than that, and I absolutely would put it up against books from the great sci-fi era that I read growing up.
> I blend what Wikipedia calls Golden Age and New Wave together
Well, you do you, but nobody will understand what you mean and I don't think there's any thematic, aesthetic, literary, or social basis for this.
Brin, Bujold, Card, Cherryh, Gibson, Simmons, Vinge, Willis
Even in terms of "what would a 30-50yo today have found on the local bookstore's sf shelf as a child to whom all past is equally distant?", Niven, Delaney, Robinson and Silverberg (who actually published in the final days of the "Golden Age", unlike Bear) are still with us.
Joe Haldeman, William Gibson, Piers Anthony, David Brin. Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, KW Jeter, George Lucas, George RR Martin, Phillip Pullman, Rudy Rucker, Dan Simmons, Harry Turtledove, John Varley, Connie Wilson, Timothy Zahn are all around
Though it is sad he joins the ranks of authors from his generation who died earlier than expected - Pratchett, Iain Banks, Robert Jordan ..
Considered never reading it so there’d always be a new Ian M Banks, but the temptation was too great. Glad I did too as it was excellent.
His science fiction is much more golden age in style, robots and bug eyed monsters, though he often made fun of both tropes.
After that I got my hands on every book he had written. Moving Mars is possibly the only book I ever read twice.
Later in life reading sci-fi is no longer an interest of mine, however his books were transformative for me.
May the great simulation resurrect him other heat death.
Agree - this was a refreshingly novel SF concept that he developed. He re-used the concept somewhat in Moving Mars
I don't think I have anything useful to add beyond that statement.
Followed by The Forge of God and Blood Music. I don't won't to ruin the endings of these two, but who knew you could end books like that?!
Queen of Angels was the weirdest detective book I'd ever encountered, with futuristic CSI way ahead of its time.
The power levels of the conflicts in Moving Mars and Anvil of Stars seemed unimaginable.
Slant, one of my favorites, felt like something like cyberpunk, but something else as well.
I've always thought him as my favorite of the Killer B's (Bear, Brin, Benford). And one of the authors that really changed how I thought about things
Trying to reconcile my own feeling that I sinned against Fiona Task- Felder, as Thierry had sinned against so many... I cannot make it sensible.
No one will understand, not even myself, but when I die, I want to be placed in the Ice Pit with my sister and William. God forgive me, even with Thierry, Robert and Emilia, and the rest of the heads...
In the Quiet.
Man I'm sad he won't write more but I appreciate how much he gave us.
Eon is the best, but it's tied to the geopolitics of the 80s.
Blood Music is, I think, almost as good as Eon but isn't quite so "of it's time". Slightly more accessible. I'd start there. He also has a fine body of short fiction, including the short Blood Music is based on. For that, you could try the collection Tangents.