Writing: Science Fiction
My Bear Hero
Greg Bear tells his last story
In the 1970s and 80s the science fiction world was shaken by the arrival of a new wave of hard science fiction writers. Writers who weren’t fudging the science but were exploiting the most recent research to tell stories and write detailed novels that had an air of assurance and plausibility unavailable to those just, well, making it up.
Star Trek and Star Wars may have had a good line in technological jargon but the science in their science fiction was basically indistinguishable from magic.
Not so Greg Bear. There were few harder in the science fiction world than he. His ideas were groundbreaking. If he had been an actual researcher he would have been gathering Nobel Awards on his trophy shelf instead of Hugo and Nebula Awards, presented to those leading in SF writing.
Firmly entrenched within the science fiction world of writing and publishing, he was a long-time friend of the marvelously lyrical Ray Bradbury, and he married Astrid, daughter of fantasy and science fiction superstar Poul Anderson.
His works were wide-ranging in genre and theme, exploring often unintended consequences of scientific breakthroughs. His Darwin’s Radio pretty much-reinterpreted life on earth as a time-traveling…
