Science Fiction Aficionados discussion

my obituary for Greg Bear, https://vocal.media/futurism/greg-bea...

Thank you for writing this eulogy, Paul. A sad loss.

It's possible to pull up Greg D. Bear's first published story free of charge on the Internet Archive: "Destroyers". It was published in 1967 in the Winter 1967/68 issue of Famous Science Fiction. The story is quite well written, very short and a fun read. Hard to believe a 16-year-old would have been sufficiently politically aware enough to write such a tale.

After that early start, Greg Bear's second story was not published until July 1974. I picked up a copy of the anthology it was published in and have just read the story. It was really good, a sensitively told story about loneliness. The page one inside from the cover has a blurb that says this about the story titled "Webster": "Love is more than just a word when a spinster finally sets out to make a man--in Webster." The protagonist is a 50-year-old woman, Miss Coates, who has never taken a lover, but decides it's time, and so creates one.

I obtained the story as I said from the anthology it was originally published in (Alternities) because it only cost me $9.42 to have a nice copy of the book mailed to me. I personally can't believe it was still available at so cheap a price. David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin published five anthologies of original speculative fiction in the 1970s. I've read (and reviewed here on GoodReads) the first two and they are of outstanding quality. This one (the fourth) looks like it will be too. I have temporarily skipped their third anthology because the fourth here has Greg Bear's story in it, which I wanted to get to. This anthology would only be of specialist interest to people who like speculative fiction produced during that "protest" period; it wouldn't be for everyone.

Greg Bear reanthologized "Webster" many, many times since its original publication. If you're interested in reading this excellent story because you're interested primarily in reading Greg Bear, obtaining his The Collected Stories of Greg Bear might be a good way to go.

I read Greg Bear's third published short story, "Perihesperon," in the anthology in which it first saw print and reviewed that anthology, including Bear's story, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... It was a wonderful short story.