Greg Bear (www.gregbear.com) lives in Alderwood Manor, Washington. He has published more than thirty books of SF and fantasy, the most famous of which are probably Blood Music, Eon, and Moving Mars. His The Collected Stories of Greg Bear appeared in 2002. He has been awarded two Hugos and five Nebulas for his fiction, one of two authors to win a Nebula in every category. His latest novel, Quantico, was released in November of 2005 in the UK and will soon be released in the U.S. According to his website, “Bear is on the advisory board of the recently opened Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, has served on political and scientific action committees, and has advised Microsoft Corporation, the U.S. Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories, and other groups and agencies.”
“Ram Shift Phase 2” was published in Nature. It is both an amusing parody of a pretentious and (at least) slightly wrong-headed book review, and an interesting extrapolation.