Greg Bear

A superlative science fiction author with a penchant for sweeping, all-encompassing plotlines and a talent for writing sympathetic, human characters.

Most at home with the biological sciences, but he's also well versed in astronomy and physics. His books cover more intellectual ground than your average university philosophy text, but still manage to be spellbinding. His writing is sometimes quite sensual.

His works include Queen of Angels, Slant and Moving Mars, which all occur in the same future world, and collectively span a period of time from the mid 21st century, straight through to the end of the 22nd century. Although the books' plots are largely unrelated, they share some characters and are similar in tone and in the ideas they present.

He also wrote Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, a two-book cycle about Earth's first (and last) encounter with intelligent aliens, and the aftermath.

His latest offering is Darwin's Radio, a biological thriller chock-full of hard sf to suit the pickiest microbiologist, with a truly epic ending. It is similar to Blood Music, one of his first novels.

Greg Bear, along with Gregory Benford and David Brin, are known as the three "Killer B's" of hard science fiction. That said, his work is the least hard of the three, often relying more on pure (though massively intelligent and insightful) speculation than on current trends in science for his visions of the future. A little bit of freedom from scientific rigor works out well for Bear, too, since it gives him more free pages to write about the people and internal conflicts that make his work great. Out of all of the sf I've read, only Bear's The Forge of God (and maybe Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer) have actually made me feel for the characters and their sacrifices.

Bear was born in 1951, in San Diego, in a Navy family that traveled all over the world. He started submitting short stories to magazines around age thirteen while his family lived in Alaska, and first sold one to a publisher at age fifteen. By the 70's he was publishing consistently, and sometime in the middle 80's he became a full-time writer. Since he began, Bear has written over 25 books, ranging from fantasy to hard science fiction, and even collaborating on a work (Foundation and Chaos) that takes place in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe. He's also won a few Hugo and Nebula awards, and sold a short story to be adopted for the second Twilight Zone television show.

Today Bear lives in San Diego with his wife Astrid Anderson-Bear and his two children Erik and Alexandra, still writing full-time. He has a few works in progress, and his most recent novel is Rogue Planet, set in the Star Wars universe. He's written two serieses, one composed of Eon, Eternity and Legacy, and the other of The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. I haven't read the former, but the latter is emotionally compelling and full of interesting speculative biology, and comes wholly recommended.

Bear's books include:

Hegira (1979)
Beyond Heaven's River (1980)
Strength of Stones (1982)
The Infinity Concerto (1984)
Corona (1984, Star Trek universe)
Eon (1985)
Blood Music (1985)
The Serpent Mage (1986)
The Forge of God (1987)
Eternity (1988)
Early Harvest (1988)
Tangents (1989)
Heads (1990)
Queen of Angels (1990)
The Venging (1992)
Bear's Fantasies (1992)
Songs of Earth and Power (1992)
Anvil of Stars (1992)
Hardfought (1993)
Moving Mars (1993)
Legacy (1995)
Slant (1997)
Dinosaur Summer (1998)
Foundation And Chaos (1998, Foundation universe)
Darwin's Radio (1999)
Rogue Planet (2000, Star Wars universe)