Greg Bear - Career

Career

Bear is often classified as a hard science fiction author, based on the scientific details in his work. Early in his career, he also published work as an artist, including illustrations for an early version of the Star Trek Concordance and covers for Galaxy and F&SF. He sold his first story, "Destroyers", to Famous Science Fiction in 1967.

Bear often addresses major questions in contemporary science and culture with fictional solutions. For example, The Forge of God offers an explanation for the Fermi paradox, supposing that the galaxy is filled with potentially predatory intelligences and that young civilizations that survive are those that don't attract their attention—by staying quiet. In Queen of Angels, Bear examines crime, guilt, and punishment in society. He frames these questions around an examination of consciousness and awareness, including the emergent self-awareness of highly advanced computers in communication with humans. In Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children, he addresses the problem of over-population with a mutation in the human genome making, basically, a new series of humans. The question of cultural acceptance of something new and unavoidable is also brought up.

One of Bear's favorite themes is reality as a function of observers. In Blood Music, reality becomes unstable as the number of observers—trillions of intelligent single-cell organisms—spirals higher and higher. Anvil of Stars (sequel to The Forge of God) and Moving Mars postulate a physics based on information exchange between particles, capable of being altered at the "bit level." (Bear has credited the inspiration for this idea to Frederick Kantor's 1967 treatise "Information Mechanics.") In Moving Mars, this knowledge is used to remove Mars from the solar system and transfer it to an orbit around a distant star.

Blood Music was first published as a short story (1983) and then expanded to a novel (1985). It has also been credited as the first account of nanotechnology in science fiction. More certainly, the short story is the first in science fiction to describe microscopic medical machines and to treat DNA as a computational system capable of being reprogrammed; that is, expanded and modified. In later works, beginning with Queen of Angels and continuing with its sequel, Slant, Bear gives a detailed description of a near-future nanotechnological society. This historical sequence continues with Heads—which may contain the first description of a so-called "quantum logic computer"—and with Moving Mars. This sequence also charts the historical development of self-awareness in AIs. Its continuing character Jill was inspired in part by Robert A. Heinlein's self-aware computer Mycroft HOLMES (High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor) in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Such recent works as Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children stick closely to the known facts of molecular biology of viruses and evolution. While some fairly speculative ideas are entertained, they are introduced in such a rigorous and disciplined way that Darwin's Radio gained praise in the science journal Nature.

Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin wrote a trilogy of prequel novels to Isaac Asimov's influential Foundation trilogy. Bear is credited for the middle book.

While most of Bear's work is science fiction, he has written in other fiction genres. Examples include Songs of Earth and Power (fantasy) and Psychlone (horror). Bear has described his Dead Lines, which straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy, as a "high-tech ghost story." He has received many accolades, including five Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards.