Greg Bear was born on August 20, 1951, in San Diego, California. He grew up in many different locales, however; his father was in the navy, and the family lived in Japan and the Philippines as well as on naval bases on the Gulf Coast, the East Coast, and the West Coast of the United States.

>Bear's childhood experiences in different cultures may account for the sensitivity to different cultures in his fiction (for example, in Dinosaur Summer). Moving about frequently is hard on friendships, and Bear's passion for reading may have its origin in the lonely hours he spent by himself when he was young. Today he is an eclectic reader of science and history as well as fiction.

His ambition to be a writer seems to have begun early, perhaps when he was eight years old. By the time he was a teenager he...