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.