Psyclone by Greg Bear
Review by Bob Wright
Psyclone by Greg Bear is not the best SF novel ever written, nor is it the worst. I agree with Bill that Bear is one of the best, if not the best I might add, writers of "technical" SF writing today. One of his novels, Psyclone, has recently come out again. It was originally published in 1979 (or at least that was the © date on it) and it shows just how far Bear has come from then to his more recent, highly recommended novels Eon and The Forge of God. Psyclone is about strange things happening to normal people due to a natural phenomenon known as, yeah, you guessed it, a psyclone. Since it seemed pretty obvious I have no problem giving away some of the details of the novel. Essentially, the psyclone is a collection of the rended souls of the various people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the atomic blasts back in 1945. It took 35 years to cross the Pacific, but it's here and it's mad as hell. Sounds silly, but the rather tenuous of it all is made up for by Bear's vivid characters and dialogue. Bear not only, generally, knows his science, but handles the elements of telling a good story very well. I can't say that I would recommend Psyclone for people who haven't read Bear before. It's a good book, but Forge of God is exceptional and that is the place to start with this promising writer of the 90's.
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