Bearing with Greg Bear

Earlier in his career, noted science fiction writer Greg Bear published some fantasy novels and short stories.  Six short stories were collected in Bear's Fantasies (1992); they were all later included in The Collected Stories of Greg Bear (2002).  Bear's Fantasies was reissued as Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies of Greg Bear (2004). The six stories are minor but entertaining pieces.  Somehow most of them don't really work as short stories, and in my somewhat limited reading of Bear he seems to have difficulties with shorter works. His famous story "Blood Music" was first a short story in 1983, and was expanded to a brilliant first half of a novel Blood Music (1985), with the second half of the novel being a rather disappointing sequel to the first half. But the idea of Blood Music is brilliant. Too bad there is nothing so engaging in his fantasy short stories. 

The Herald of Crap

I've heard very good things about The Killer Angels (1974) by Michael Shaara, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975.  I'd also heard good things about his science fiction novel The Herald (1981), and it just happened to be the first book of Shaara's I picked up to read.  I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but I didn't.  It's a techno-disaster in the Michael Crichton genre, but even worse than Crichton.  The characters are stock, and have no development, and even worse the writing style is clumsy and choppy, with very short paragraphs and lots of trite dialogue. Basically, like many of Crichton's books, it is just a fleshed out screenplay for a B-grade film that wouldn't be worth watching. Here the improbably named Nick Tesla lands his small plane at at airport in the southeast, only to discover the town all dead save for himself and some strays who, like him, are apparently immune to the radiation that he learns the town has been subjected to.  Add some military men, and evil scientists, and you get a predictable, dull result.  Shaara re-wrote the ending and retitled the book The Noah Conspiracy when it was reissued in 1994. But I can't find it in me to care about any supposed revision.  Nothing could make this a worthwhile read. I'm not for book burning, but if this one ended up in a fire I wouldn't try to save it.