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Greg Bear
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 Greg Bear looks at this moment to be the most successful of all the younger hard sf writers of the 1980s.
He seems to have taken a place in the perceptions of hard sf readers in the lineal descent from Clarke and
Clement through Niven and Benford to the present generation. He is married to Astrid Anderson, the
daughter of Poul Anderson and is a past President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Like Clarke and
Benford in particular, he is often drawn to speculative ideas on the largest scale, in the philosophical tradition of
Olaf Stapledon, but with a characteristically genre-writer's devotion to plot logic and character. He has not
been afraid to experiment in his short fiction, and was included by Bruce Sterling in the influential
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. But his public allegiance is to hard sf, not "the Movement."
Uncharacteristically, he trained not as a scientist but as an artist, and his first notable sf publications were of cover illustration in
the 1970s. Bear's stories and novels began to appear in the late 1970s, but it was with his story, "Blood
Music" (later expanded into a 1985 novel) and his collection
The Wind From a Burning Woman (1983) that he
first came into prominence, and rapidly thereafter he produced an impressive list of hard sf novels,
Eon (1985), The Forge of God (1987),
Eternity (1987), and Queen of Angels (1990) that catapulted him into the first ranks
of hard sf writers.
"Tangents" is the title story from his second collection of stories (1989). It is a fascinating
mathematical tale, in the direct line from Abbott's
Flatland (and a companion piece to Rucker's "Ms. Found in a Copy of
Flatland"). It is an hard sf story, in which the characters solve problems, go places, do things. Bear's
clever and accomplished use of genre materials and stereotypes (the isolated scientific genius, the
mathematical wunderkind, the prejudiced political and scientific establishment) combine beautifully and powerfully with
his translation of abstract mathematical concepts into literal images. It is also an interesting contrast to Philip
K. Dick's "The Indefatigable Frog," in its attitude toward the science and math, and Kuttner's classic "Mimsy Were
the Borogoves," wherein Carrollian games and logical paradoxes are privileged over the literal use of
scientific knowledge to solve problems.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.