introduction

01 Blood Music
02 The Road of the Dead
03 Schrödinger's Plague
04 Tangent
05 Sisters
06 The road leads nowhere
07 Slipside Story
08 Webster
09 The Martian Reappears

Author's Note - The Pleasure Machine

A new dimension of ecosystem where non-humans and humans coexist
The first science fiction film to feature nanotechnology

“People don’t know that science fiction is the greatest social novel of our time, and Greg Bear is the greatest writer.
“I admire him.” - Doris Lessing (Nobel Prize-winning author)

Humanity, which has survived by controlling the environment through the accumulation of knowledge and technological development, has ruled as the top predator on Earth, excluding other species.
In his short story collection Tangent, Bear draws attention to the imbalance between human culture and ideology, which changes more slowly than the pace of scientific and technological advancement.

“I am being reassembled from the inside out.”
"Blood Music" is a body horror/SF film that deals with a tragedy that begins with curiosity about cells that have become intelligent through experiments.
The story unfolds as genetic engineer Virgil injects a colony of cells into his body that have gained their own will through computer-learned instructions to "proliferate and improve freely." He seeks out a doctor to prevent the microscopic ecosystem inside his body from developing out of control and taking over his brain.
The short story was revised and republished as a novella the year after winning the Hugo Award, and won France's Apollo Prize.

“Because I’m trapped here.
“Because no one in the outside world cares about me.”
The short story "Tangent," a tribute to Alan Turing, explores the solidarity between two characters suffering from isolated loneliness.
Boy Pal is a character who was adopted from Korea to the United States, and mathematician Tusi is a character who traveled through time from the past to the present.
Two characters, longing to escape this three-dimensional world where no one knows them, discover that there is a civilization in the fourth dimension and attempt to cross over there.
"Tangent" won the Hugo, Nebula, and Nebula Awards, and was nominated for the Locus Award and Germany's Kurd Laswicz Prize.

“How does it feel to look like your grandmother?”
"Sisters," which deals with a future in which children can be designed through genetic engineering, was published in 1990 and was nominated for the Locus Award and the Nebula Award.
Baer's pioneering vision stands out in that it was published before the film Gattaca, which sparked public interest and debate about genetic engineering.
Leticia, a natural child who envies her designed friends, calls herself a "defect."
But as the side effects of the technology start to cause his friends to die one after another, the adults around him start treating the pre-designed children as 'defective'...
In a world turned upside down, among children whose egos are shaken, the final steps of the protagonist Leticia emphasize the moving growth and solidarity between humans and non-humans.

A writer who dedicated his life to the genre of science fiction
Something Beyond Dimensions, Invited by Greg Bear

“What I love most about Greg Bear is that he freely embraces all the realms that science fiction has to offer.
“With his boundless imagination, he led us on a grand journey.”_Robert J.
Sawyer (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Campbell Award-winning author)

Greg Bear has expanded the possibilities of science fiction by combining the terror of horror, the mystery of fantasy, and the lyricism of fairy tales.
By combining cool-headed scientific narratives with deep characterization, it proved that hard science fiction can embrace emotion and thought.
This combination led us to delve deeper into the meaning of human existence, living in a world where technology functions as civilization, rather than technology itself.
As one of the co-founders of San Diego Comic-Con International, he has contributed significantly to the popularization of science fiction. He served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (now known as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) for two years, encouraging and consistently supporting artistic talent on science fiction and fantasy topics.
Baer, ​​who was named the "Best Hard SF Writer" by The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, is a person who dreams of a future where SF can transcend genres and media.
The short story collection "Tangent" contains many short stories that will appeal to both science fiction and mystery readers, revealing the author's inclinations, and has since become a source of inspiration for countless science fiction works.

Among the included works, "Dead Man's Road," which deals with the story of a truck driver who takes dead souls to heaven or hell, was produced as an episode of the drama series "Twilight Zone," which was a hit in the 1960s in the United States and served as the origin of "Stranger Things," "Amazing Stories," and "Black Mirror."
"Schrödinger's Plague," which presents a physicist's crazy experiment with the intention of human extinction, has been cited as an inspiration by John Gribbin, author of the classic quantum mechanics science fiction work "In Search of Schrödinger's Cat."
Set in a future where Germany has won World War II, the short story "The Road Leads Nowhere" is a philosophical examination of human karma from an apocalyptic perspective, and was selected and included in "The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century."

Just as the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was criticized for its absurd subject matter of interstellar travel, is now being re-evaluated with a view to space exploration, science fiction may no longer be an unfamiliar subject matter to modern readers.
Greg Bear, on the minority nature of contemporary science fiction, which is inevitably consumed by popular perception, says, “We tend to forget that we stand on bones and muscle.
“A brain without bones and muscles cannot function properly,” he said.
Greg Bear's novels are a tribute to humanity's legacy, a legacy passed down through ever-changing knowledge.
As current knowledge is always changing, our perspectives must have changed a lot as well.
Aren't you curious to see how Greg Bear's science fiction, which attempts to view the world from a wide and diverse perspective, would be perceived by us today?

Author's Note

For many people, printed material is difficult to digest.
Although it has many uses and advantages, it often fails to convey information as quickly and efficiently as other media.
The dilemma is clear.
Print media offers diversity and individual expression, and the active participation of readers who imagine and concretize the message the text is trying to convey.
However, it cannot reach as many people as television or movies.

Television and movies actively appeal to the masses, but often end up spoon-fed cliches to unthinking viewers.

By combining print and visual media, computers will break the monopoly of money and enable more people to work with “pictorial narrative,” a term that will inevitably lead to the development of various art forms.
(…) If it weren’t too late now… .

Let's take a deep breath.
We're entering a possible future, and it's going to take some getting used to.