Yeah well, Bear is pretty reactionary-- in his contribution to the "new" Foundation trilogy, he used his chance to bash affirmative action and a host of liberal ideals. Which is pretty annoying given that Asimov was a Communist when he started writing the series.
It's interesting the drift in "hard" science fiction from the lefties of the "Golden Age" (Asimov, Pohl and a variety of others who actually had their own communist group in New York at one point) to the much more rightwing moderns like Bear and Larry Niven. It is interesting how the technocrats abandoned utopian visions for the technolibertarian engineer-as-hero trope.
-- Nathan Newman