Geekwire is reporting that Hugo & Nebula award winning science fiction writer Greg Bear died Saturday in Seattle of complications from heart surgery.
One of the ‘Four B’s’ of ‘hard’ science fiction, (Bear, Benford, Bova & Brin), (complete bibliography at Wiki), from television & short stories to novels & series. The most recent, ‘The Unfinished Land’, was published last year.
The Geekwire piece is a good overview, he did a full interview with them in 2017. His wife, Astrid Anderson Bear, is the daughter of fellow SF authors Poul and Karen Anderson.
My father & step mother were involved in SF publishing back in the day and had met them through the Cons circuit.
Ad astra Greg.
Adding from Harry Joy‘s comment below:
Allen Steele, one of my favorite writers, along with the recently passed Ben Bova, posted this tribute on Facebook today:
Greg Bear, my friend and colleague, passed away last night, brought down by a stroke that (as I understand it) followed emergency heart surgery from which he never awoke. The suddenness of this stuns me; I learned about this last evening when another friend emailed me with the bitter news.
Somewhere in the world there’s a picture of Bear (as friends knew him), Greg Benford, and myself standing together in a secondhand bookstore in Hatfield MA, fresh from a hike we’d just taken up Mt. Sugarloaf not far from my house. The two Gregs — two-thirds of the so-called “Killer Bees”, the third member being David Brin — were visiting my corner of the world for a speaking engagement at Smith College. I had breakfast with them at their hotel that morning (during which I showed them my design sketch of the URSS “Alabama”, the ship in the novel I was writing then, COYOTE, and asked for their feedback) and then I took them to Mt. Sugarloaf for a walk up to the summit and its amazing view of the Pioneer Valley of western Mass. It’s one of my favorite memories of time spent with fellow SF writers, and my favorite memory of Bear himself.
I can’t lay my hands on my copy of that photo, so I’ll show you something better: a stack of Bear’s books from my collection. If you haven’t read his work, you owe it to yourself to do so. Greg Bear was one of the best hard-SF writers of the last 50 years; every single one of these novels and collections is worth your attention, although if I had to pick my favorite, it would be THE FORGE OF GOD, absolutely the most frightening novel about the possible consequences of first-contact with aliens (and realistic enough that, shortly after it was published, I had a conversation about it with two Harvard physics professors whom I was interviewing for a magazine article about SETI). But the others here — EON, BLOOD MUSIC, the collection THE WIND FROM A BURNING WOMAN, MOVING MARS — are equally as impressive.
Perhaps this is the way great writers ought to be remembered: not by photos, but by the books and stories they wrote and left behind. I have plenty of memories of Bear, mainly from encounters at SF conventions. He was one of the first senior writers I met when I entered the field myself in 1989; he was president of SFWA at the time, shortly before my first novel ORBITAL DECAY was published, and he urged me to join the organization using that novel as my credentials (SFWA used to be much harder to join then). I hadn’t seen Greg in quite a while. He stopped attending many cons (as I’m now doing, albeit not always by choice) so our recent contact was only by an occasional email exchange. Yet I’ll always have some great memories … and there’s always his books.
Goodbye, Bear. See you around the galaxy.
