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User:AstroJones/Jon Lachonis

< User:AstroJones
Gregory Dale Bear
Greg Bear (2005)
Greg Bear (2005)
OccupationNovelist
GenreScience fiction, Speculative Fiction
Notable worksBlood Music
Website
www.gregbear.com

Gregory Dale Bear (born August 20, 1951) is an American science fiction and mainstream author. His work has covered themes of galactic conflict (Forge of God books), artificial universes (The Way series), consciousness and cultural practices (Queen of Angels), and accelerated evolution (Blood Music, Darwin's Radio, and Darwin's Children). Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin also wrote a trilogy of prequel novels to Isaac Asimov's famous Foundation trilogy with Bear credited for the middle book in the trilogy.

Biography

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Bear was born in San Diego, California. From 1968 to 1973 he attended San Diego State University, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1975, he married Christina M. Nielson, but they divorced in 1981. He remarried in 1983, to Astrid Anderson, the daughter of science fiction author Poul Anderson. They have two children, Erik and Alexandra. Erik is currently a Painting and Drawing major at the University of Washington. They live outside of Seattle, Washington.

Career

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Bear is often classified as a hard science fiction author, based on the scientific details in his work.

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 those young civilizations which survive are those which do not attract the attention of the predators — by staying quiet. In Queen of Angels Bear examines crime, guilt and punishment in society, framing these questions around an examination of consciousness and awareness, including the emergent self-awareness of highly-advanced computers in communication with humans.

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. Both Anvil of Stars — a 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 (first published as a short story in 1983, and expanded to a novel in 1985) has also been credited as being 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, with its continuing character, Jill, 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.

More recent works such as the Darwin's Radio/Darwin's Children pair of novels, which deal with the impact of a strange disease which appears to drive evolutionary transitions, 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.

While most of Bear's work is science fiction, two of his early works, The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage, which are now published together as one novel Songs of Earth and Power, are clearly fantasies, and Psychlone is horror. Dead Lines, which straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy was described by Bear as a "high-tech ghost story" (interview, Fiction Writers of the Monterey Peninsula). He has received many accolades, including five Nebula awards and two Hugo awards for science fiction.

Bibliography

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Collection of Short Stories

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Darwin

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  • Darwin's Radio (1999) Nebula Award winner, 2001[1]; Hugo, Locus SF, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards nominee, 2000[2]
  • Darwin's Children (2003) Locus SF, Arthur C. Clarke, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards nominee, 2004[3]

The Way Series

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The Forge of God series

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Second Foundation Series

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Songs of Earth and Power

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Star Trek: The Original Series

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Man-Kzin Wars

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Star Wars

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Queen of Angels

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A group of novels featuring a shared history and some common characters.

  • Queen of Angels (1990) Hugo, Locus, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards nominee, 1991[8]
  • Heads (1990)
  • Moving Mars (1993) Nebula winner, 1995[9]; Hugo, Locus SF, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards nominee, 1994[10]
  • / (aka Slant) (1997) John W. Campbell Memorial Award nominee, 1998[11]

Non-series Novels

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Other awards and accolades

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  • Before Blood Music was a novel, it was a story published in the June 1983 issue of Asimov's. It won the Best Novelette Nebula Award (1983) and Hugo Award (1984).[15]
  • Darwin's Radio won the Endeavor Award in 2000
  • Hayakawa Award "Heads" Best Foreign Short Story (1996).
  • Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature, wrote, "I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like Blood Music, by Greg Bear. He's a great writer."[3]

References

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  1. ^ http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/search-list-Greg%20Bear/~SW=Y~subject=cat3
  2. ^ http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345448392
  3. ^ Doris Lessing: Hot Dawns, interview by Harvey Blume in Boston Book Review
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