While it is as hard to recommend this particular collection as it is to warn against it, the writing it contains is absolutely worth your time. Greg Bear is in some ways the rarest of his kind: a hard SF author whose liberalism is expressed not through technocracy, but through a fundamental compassion. That he takes his compassion to the extremes of science and math, to fantastical worlds and horror plots, only reinforces the ways that hard science fiction is capable of so much more than the technocratic liberalism and the libertarian fetishism that it so often seems synonymous with. Bear's futures with public funding and union protections may seem more and more anachronistic, but only if we don't catch the utopian spark in them that even he almost certainly didn't intend. In much the same way, Bear himself is increasingly an anachronism in the political space of speculative fiction. Reading him, though, is to remember that not only is another world possible, it is still here. It only needs to be worked toward.

Bee Gabriel

I used to read a lot of Greg Bear's science fiction novels back in the 1990s and early 2000s, but haven't really kept up with him. This is volume 1 of a collection of his short fiction, and like any short fiction collection, varies in quality. It starts out really great, but is dragged down by the back half of the book which consists of just two things - a terrible novella (a quasi-retelling of Beauty and the Beast with a gender reversal and a sort of enchanted prostitute, really cringey), and a screenplay for an episode of an anthology tv series which was never made, which was not a bad story but not the most enjoyable format to read. I'm going to average it out and give the collection a 3 which is being somewhat generous since that novella was so bad it almost drags this collection down to a 2 since it also completely stalled my reading of this book. I definitely would return to reading Greg Bear's novels, but will probably pass on reading volumes 2 and 3 of his short fiction.