Bear, Greg

• Series: Songs of Earth and Power
  • The Infinity Concerto (9)
  • The Serpent Mage (9)

    • These two books were the first I ever read by Bear, and they are VERY impressive. This is a dual-world series where interactions between worlds come from "Songs of Power" which can be anything from classical music to poetry. In an alternate world, a group of humans who have accidentally crossed over are held in a prison camp by a race of Elf-like Sidhe. Lots of good characters and creepy sequences! This recently come out in a gorgeous new hardback, somewhat reedited by Bear and including a new explanatory afterword. I bought it for myself as a Xmas present and reread it, liking it even more the second time. Don't miss this book!

• Queen of Angels (6)

  • Bear's version of the cyberpunk genre. I thought it was very good, showing a cohesive view of "cyberspace" and the real world while putting a good plot together. I dare say he outdoes Gibson at his own game.

• Eon (6 r)

  • Hard-SF story about a weird world hidden inside an asteroid that opens into an infinitely long tunnel. I had a hard time getting through the techno-babble on this one, but I still enjoyed it a great deal...lots of tremendously good ideas.

• Eternity (5)

  • Much of the same techno-babble problem as in Eon, but this one has a much grander scale. I had a hard time not thinking about the writing style in the latter Dune books while reading this what with the very detailed descriptions of the thoughts and motivations of each character. Anyway, in this story, a visitor from the future comes back to try and convince the builders of the "Way" (the infinite tunnel) that they need to destory it to preserve the future. Starts off very jumpy, and most of the book has far too many plotlines going to follow easily, even though some come together. Some are promising, some are boring and seem almost completely pointless. The overall novel is just kinda there...if you liked Eon, this is worth reading.

• The Forge of God (7 r)

  • Very interesting end-of-the-world type story. The plot didn't fail to surprise me, which is nice, and it had (as is usual for Bear) some very nice SF ideas. Despite the "uplifting" ending, I was still pretty damned depressed after reading this book. I strongly recommend this one.

• The Anvil of Stars (4)

  • Sequel to the "The Forge of God" and a completely different kind of book. Asks an interesting philosophical question, though: What do you do to a civilization that has committed some horrible crime, like wiping out another civilization, but then evolves out of the "nasty" phase before you can punish them? Anyway, most of the story is about a spaceship full of children who have weird attitudes about sex and shipboard politics. Still, I liked the mental ground this book covered and the ideas were enough to keep me going despite not really liking most of the character interaction.

• Blood Music (6 r)

  • Fairly short novel about a bacteria colony with collective intelligence proportional to the size of the colony. I thought it was very interesting and worth a read. (The colony gets REALLY big.)

• Hegira (5 r)

  • Another short story turned into a novel. This one has a very intriguing premise: In a developing civilization, there stand these enormously big and tall pillars. On the sides of the pillars are "books of knowledge". As you go up, you find out more, which gives you the technology to reach still greater heights, and so on. Then some guy gets the idea to chop one down... Not a bad story, if you can find it at a used book store. Not Bear's best, but not bad.

• Moving Mars (7)

  • Written as the retrospective autobiography of a politically important figure on Mars during a pivotal time in its history, a couple of centuries in the future. The science fiction element picks up where "Heads" and "Queen of Angels" left off. Mars is struggling for independence while Earth is struggling to control it, and amidst it all, some revolutionary physical breakthroughs are making awesome things possible (and awesome weapons). Starts off slow, but the buildup is necessary for the excellent last half of the book, which is tense and exciting. This ending was a little too terse...this book all but DEMANDS a sequel.

• Heads (7)

  • I had been avoiding this in the bookstores because I hate spending a lot of money for such a slender little novel. What can I say? I'm cheap. Anyway, I finally found this at a used bookstore, and I'm glad I waited. It's pretty good, with an interesting couple of bits of interrelated science fiction experiments along with the early politics of Bear's solar system future history. The religion in this book is modelled quite heavily on Hubbard's "Scientology". If you liked "Moving Mars" and want to read more about this milieu, I definitely recommend this book.

• Darwin's Radio (7)

  • In this novel, an ancient virus encoded in human DNA begins to strike the world's population, triggered by unknown events (but speculated upon quite a bit by scientists in the book). This virus infects expectant mothers and causes strange mutations in their offspring, usually resulting in death. Is this a virus that threatens to wipe out the species or a virus that has the potential to prompt an evolutionary leap not seen since the advent of the Neanderthals?

    An archeologist with a bad reputation for not respecting the integrity of sites finds an early Neanderthal skeleton, preserved for centuries in an isolated mountain cave, which shows the same symptoms as the modern virus. He joins up with a geneticist and a few other specialists to try to track down the truth while the nation is on the verge of chaos. As usual with Bear's novels, his characters are very strong, and the plot involves interesting moral and ethical dilemmas. The biology in this one is virtually impossible for a layperson like me to follow, unfortunately, and I had to write off a lot of the same kind of speculative science that interested me (as a Physicist and Astronomer) in the Eon/Eternity series.

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