Remembering Lynnwood’s Greg Bear: author, San Diego Comic-Con co-founder, friend

Editor’s note: Lynnwood’s Greg Bear — a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author and co-founder of San Diego Comic-Con — died Nov. 19. Here, his fellow author and friend Nisi Shawl remembers Bear.

His name was Greg Bear. He died Nov. 19. He was one of the founders of the enormously successful San Diego Comic-Con, a convention promoting comics, animation, science fiction and fantasy that became a model for similar events in Seattle, New York and just about every other major city in North America. He was an all-in speculative fiction author with over 50 books to his name. He was a brilliant teacher, a collector with a library full of rolling hospital-record-style shelving units. He was a husband, a father, a friend to me, a benefactor to pretty much everyone he met, and he was supposed to live a lot longer than 71 years.

Maybe forever.

Greg Bear once asked me, rhetorically, what the characters in the novel he was writing wanted. He answered himself: “They want what we all want — beautiful children and immortality.” Then, because he was so good at what he did, Greg proceeded to torture those characters by throwing unexpected obstacles in their paths and coming up with ingenious plot devices to prevent them from fulfilling their desires. But though his own life ended far too soon, he managed to achieve at least the first part of his formula for success: beautiful children. I’ve spent a decade-and-a-half watching his daughters Chloe and Alexandra mature into kind, perceptive, funny adults, people who are gorgeous inside and out.

With his wife Astrid, Greg created a home where growth and change were supported and welcomed: for those who lived there, on the water lily-strewn banks of Martha Lake, and for their many lucky guests. Every July, the students, staff and volunteers of the Seattle-based Clarion West Writers Workshop received invitations to the Bears’ for a potluck party, an afternoon of rare relaxation complete with swimsuits and kayaks. To these breaks from the rigors of the intense six-week workshop we would bring salads, snacks, side dishes and desserts to complement our hosts’ abundant burrito fixings. It was a completely spontaneous menu. It always worked out. And year after year, budding writer after budding writer woke to the realization that this towering literary presence, this icon representing the best and brightest tendencies of our genre, was treating them as a colleague. For many of us — newcomer Alex Jennings, me — these were life-changing interactions: proof we really belonged in a world we were determined to enter.

Greg had theories on how the world of speculative fiction worked, theories on how its precisely imagined impossibilities got delivered to receptive minds. And he dreamt up an informal history of SF, too, one that covered its changing position in the cultural landscape. He shared these and other insights with us so generously, on convention panels and during those delicious potlucks. My inner eye still sees him enthroned in his leather easy chair, leaning forward to drive home a fascinating thought about the role of The Great War in technophobic, anti-SF story lines. My inner ear still hears Greg’s chortling laughter, brought on by the ridiculousness he saw in anyone trying to keep human beings from playing with ideas.

In these ways, in my memory and the memories of his family, students, friends and fans, Greg Bear lives on. He’s as close to immortal as any of us can be.