I dunno, man. KSR writes shit that I should be all-the-fuck over and I can't finish it. Red Mars was a long exploration of "I've thought about this but not about that and you don't get to either" (sure! Everyone just stops tracking time for half an hour a night! That's totally going to work!) and The Years of Rice and Salt was an alternate history in which... fuckall happens and any event is entirely quixotic and not based on any particular cause and effect but you'll fucking read it because ALTERNATE HISTORY BITCH. My main problem with Greg Bear is that he has a helluva time not ending every book or story with an utter and total cataclysm. It's like, an optimistic Greg Bear book has the literal end of the world in it. A pessimistic Greg Bear book fucking sucks all of time and space into a singularity causing the extinction of the entire astral plane. But, if you can accept that shit is going to go stare-into-the-singularity bad every time, he's thought-provoking.