Greg Bear 1951-2022

Locus Magazine notice here; not an obituary yet.

Blood Music, Eon, Eternity, "Hardfought", City at the End of Time come to mind for me.

Blood Music and his collection Tangents are two that stick out for me, with many others, like Darwins Radio and City at the End of Time that I found worth reading even the results were mixed.

Darwin's Radio and Eon come immediately to mind. I was unaware of his health problems, so the news came as quite a shock.

I even enjoyed his fantasy series that started with The Infinity Concerto. Sad news.

Blood Music, Slant, and Queen of Angels are the high points for me; he will be missed. I think what Bear did particularly well is that his stories always had a strong sense of humanity even when the situation was implacable to humanity.

Highly memorable for me was The Uplift Saga. RIP.

>6 vwinsloe:, was that Greg Bear's?

>7 Cecrow: Nope. But Brin was a good friend.

Songs of Earth and Power was my first "adult" SFF book, recommended to me by my (late) father. As a teen I liked fantasy, he loved SF. That book still has a special place in my collection, both the English version (my copy) and the Dutch (my dad's). Pretty soon I loved SF a lot more, and I have read more Bear. My favorites are Eon, Eternity and Legacy, one of the few series I reread every now and then. Sad news, and feels like the end of an era for me.

I was thinking I'd not read anything by him, but then I remembered reading Strength of Stones as a teenager.

The other day I was out hiking with my housemates and chatting. We just started watching For All Mankind recently, and although it's so so very different, the Soviet-era space stuff made me think of Eon. So I talked a little about that book, and Blood Music, and some of Bear's other works.

And then after we got home, I heard that he'd passed away. What a weird complicated feelings day.

Just now hearing about this. It's bizarre news, because my husband and I were just talking about him - literally talking about Greg Bear yesterday! We've recently moved and had to transport a lot of books, and in unpacking and rebuilding the library, chatted about various writers.

Greg Bear has been a favorite of mine since reading Moving Mars years ago. I appreciated his strong women characters, especially in this genre. I also enjoyed Eon and his better known work, but Moving Mars contains some of the most beautiful prose about the age and vastness of the planet I've ever read.

A real loss. He'll be missed.

>7 Cecrow: No, I'm sorry, totally wrong guy.