I’ve been meaning to read more of Greg Bear’s short stories, especially after reading Blood Music (my review can be found here), a groundbreaking novel that was originally based on one of his earlier stories. Fortunately his short-story collection Just Over the Horizon caught my eye right when I was looking for something to read over my vacation. This collection is volume one of what I hope will be several more books, and it features some of Bear’s earlier works from the 1970’s and 80’s, when he was already showing a dazzling skill at taking a concept that’s very tricky to understand, explaining it in a way that a non-scientist can at least start to understand, and then wrapping a story around it.
It would eat up way too much space to go into detail about all fourteen stories, so here are my favorites.
“Tangents” is one of those stories that depend on being able to understand at least a little bit of a very theoretical concept. It’s an ode to Alan Turing; it also plays with the idea of what would get the attention of a fourth-dimensional creature, and exactly what it would look like when that creature started looking around this dimension.
“Schrodinger’s Plague”is another example of one of those stories. Ever studied the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment? I’ve never been able to get my brain around the concept, but be darned if Greg Bear doesn’t manage to explain it better than anyone else. The plot for this one is a little wacky, there’s a scientist that actually laughs maniacally at one point, and apparently the author has since found out that some of the physics he used for this might not be quite right. But it’s still fun…right up to the point where it gets very, very creepy.
“Sisters” was written before the movie Gattaca was released, and it has a similar theme – coping with being one of the only genetically unmodified humans in a world of tailored perfection – but it veers into very different territory. I thought at first it was going to about learning to value our own identity, and then I was sure it was going to be a warning about the dangers of tampering with genetics. It’s actually a little bit of both, but also about being able to value everyone, instead of continuing to go along with the centuries-old concept of “us versus them.”
And then there’s “Silicon Times E-Book Review”. It’s a review written by a robot, of a book authored by a robot for a readership of robots. And the plot of the book is a hard-boiled detective novel/ghost story. With robots. It’s exactly as silly as it sounds.
I used to have a subscription to Twilight Zone Magazine in its last two years, and I was surprised to read in the forward to “Dead Run” that the story had been rejected by the magazine’s editor. It seems very much like something that would have worked for the magazine. The fact that it was eventually made into an episode of the Twilight Zone TV show would seem to confirm that. Maybe the editor thought the story – a trucker carrying damned souls to hell – wasn’t dark enough. Definitely read the forward to this one; Greg Bear is one of the few authors I’ve read about who had a story adapted into a TV show, and who enjoyed the heck out of the whole process.
Anyone who reads my reviews knows that I love a good retold fairytale, and fortunately there’s one in this book. “Sleepside Story” puts the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast in an urban setting and then flips the genders, with the youngest son having to save his mother by taking her place as prisoner of the “Beast” of this story. But it’s not quite that simple of a change. The heroine in the original tale has to learn to look past the Beast’s appearance. Here, the hero has to get past something else.
The final story, “Genius” is a screenplay written for the “Outer Limits” TV show. We go back into the fourth-dimension mind games, with some similar ideas from the story “Tangent” although in this story whatever it is that’s poking around is a lot nastier. It’s a shame that the episode was never aired, since that one Twilight Zone episode is the only film or TV adaptation that’s been done for one of Greg Bear’s stories. But I haven’t given up hope; The Forge of God has a possible movie in the works, and fans have been asking for a film version of Eon for years, so maybe one day we’ll see more of Bear’s hard sci-fi tales on screen.