City At The End Of Time
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Book Description
The 2008 tour de force from one of the masters of SF comes into paperback.
Product Description
Do you dream of a city at the end of time? In a time like the present, on a world that may or may not be our own, three young people-Ginny, Jack, and Daniel-dream of a fabulous, decadent city in the distant future: the Kalpa. The dreams of Ginny and Jack overtake them without warning, leaving their bodies behind while carrying their consciousnesses forward, into the minds of two inhabitants of the Kalpa-a would-be warrior, Jebrassy, and an inquisitive explorer, Tiadba-who have been genetically retroengineered to possess qualities of ancient humanity. In turn, the dreams of Tiadba and Jebrassy carry them back, into the minds of Jack and Ginny. As for Daniel: he dreams of an empty darkness--all his future holds. But more than dreams link Ginny, Jack, and Daniel. They are fate-shifters, born with the ability to skip like stones across the surface of the fifth dimension, inhabiting alternate versions of themselves. And they are each guardians of an object whose origins and purpose are unknown, a gnarled, stony artifact called a sum-runner that persists unchanged through all versions of time. They can save the future, but they are being hunted down.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Okay, only four and a half stars, but i opted for five not four because this is a truly magnificent, tho' difficult, book. Greg Bear has written some great SF; but i, at least, have found his recent work less exciting. This is Bear returning with a huge metaphysical vision, greater in its depth than even his 'The Way' series ('Eon', 'Eternity', and 'Legacy'). The story takes place in two time zones, now, and one hundred trillion years in the future in the eponymous city at the end of time; there is also a third arena, somewhere where there is no time, or, perhaps, all times - the chaos.
Bear has tried to imagine a universe where the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is given its most literal reading: "All the possible pathways a particle can take - or a human - an infinite number, spread out through all space and time, weak where improbable, strong where probable - all, in the end, collapsing into a single, energy-efficient path, the most resourceful and simplest world-line." I'm not sure what he means by "in the end collapsing into a single [...] path" because three of the important characters from our time have the ability to jump to alternate realities in an attempt to improve their lot. But one can't blame Bear for a bit of fuzziness here, no-one can make sense of quantum mechanics when it comes to what it means (that's according to Richard Feynman in his 'QED' - and who are we to argue with him?).
At the end of time reality as we know it has almost been destroyed by the chaos - an empty horrific meaningless force which subverts all that we know as sanity and order. Indeed, it has devoured all bar the final city - the city at the end of time. Time, within such quantum multiverse, is not fixed - start in the middle of a story, go back to the beginning, return to where you started but you'll find it's no longer the same. The essence of this story is how one of the mighty beings at the end of time - the sort of being Bear imagines a person who had had tens of trillions of years in control of their own nature might turn into - is struggling against the chaos. It's giving nothing important away to say that the alternative world jumping characters in our time are, unbeknownst to them, part of his struggle.
Any hack can tell a story with `amazing' beings in it: "His mind was godlike - as beyond ours as ours is to a beetle's." Bear is a truly great SF writer because he goes so much further, giving us the feeling that we really have glimpsed something of the incomprehensible. I was worried, as the story progressed, that there were going to be too many loose ends - beings and objects named but not described. It's true that not everything is tied up by the end, but nearly everything is. What i would have liked, tho', is a lengthy appendix with a more detailed break down of the metaphysics and ontology of this great created world.
Apart from that little quibble, this is a wonderful wonderful work of hard SF from one of our greatest living visionaries.
Bear has tried to imagine a universe where the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is given its most literal reading: "All the possible pathways a particle can take - or a human - an infinite number, spread out through all space and time, weak where improbable, strong where probable - all, in the end, collapsing into a single, energy-efficient path, the most resourceful and simplest world-line." I'm not sure what he means by "in the end collapsing into a single [...] path" because three of the important characters from our time have the ability to jump to alternate realities in an attempt to improve their lot. But one can't blame Bear for a bit of fuzziness here, no-one can make sense of quantum mechanics when it comes to what it means (that's according to Richard Feynman in his 'QED' - and who are we to argue with him?).
At the end of time reality as we know it has almost been destroyed by the chaos - an empty horrific meaningless force which subverts all that we know as sanity and order. Indeed, it has devoured all bar the final city - the city at the end of time. Time, within such quantum multiverse, is not fixed - start in the middle of a story, go back to the beginning, return to where you started but you'll find it's no longer the same. The essence of this story is how one of the mighty beings at the end of time - the sort of being Bear imagines a person who had had tens of trillions of years in control of their own nature might turn into - is struggling against the chaos. It's giving nothing important away to say that the alternative world jumping characters in our time are, unbeknownst to them, part of his struggle.
Any hack can tell a story with `amazing' beings in it: "His mind was godlike - as beyond ours as ours is to a beetle's." Bear is a truly great SF writer because he goes so much further, giving us the feeling that we really have glimpsed something of the incomprehensible. I was worried, as the story progressed, that there were going to be too many loose ends - beings and objects named but not described. It's true that not everything is tied up by the end, but nearly everything is. What i would have liked, tho', is a lengthy appendix with a more detailed break down of the metaphysics and ontology of this great created world.
Apart from that little quibble, this is a wonderful wonderful work of hard SF from one of our greatest living visionaries.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have started and stopped reading this book several times! I just can't get into it!! I love Greg Bear, but this book just drags on with nothing happening for chapter after chapter. I can see how clever the story is and the amazing science and metaphysics the author is conveying, but I found myself completely uninterested in the characters and story. By the time of "terminus" in the book, I was wishing the universe would end in reality; just so I would not have to read any more of this book! I have never given up on a book before, and for it to be a Greg Bear books seems such a shame!!! Maybe I am a "fate shifter" and this book is "gobbledy gook" to me because I am in the wrong universe?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a work of 'quantum' fantasy, as cutting edge science on the nature of matter and the linkage between observer and observed blurs into a traditional fantasy quest. A party of beings from the city of Kalpa, at the end of time (in sections dated 14 zeroes) journey out into its surrounding nullity, and, in parallel, a group of quirky individuals (in sections dated 10 zeroes) from our time and before, all bearing potent talismen, end up in a Seattle in a universe shrunk into the environs of a bookshop. Of course, all these creatures/people are the same beings, at different points in time.
One of the quaint things about this book is how much books are valued in it. Alongside all the physics meets fantasy extravaganza, books get worshipped for their role in preserving experience. Borges and his idea of the infinite Library of Babel, in which all possible texts are present, get subborned into an important role in the stew of ideas floating around.
Yet somehow it all fails to catch fire. The writing is excellent and the ideas are certainly there, but the story just takes too long. There are too many switchbacks in the plot and the science/fantasy setting starts to wear thin as the same old mysteries and truths keep coming around again and again
One of the quaint things about this book is how much books are valued in it. Alongside all the physics meets fantasy extravaganza, books get worshipped for their role in preserving experience. Borges and his idea of the infinite Library of Babel, in which all possible texts are present, get subborned into an important role in the stew of ideas floating around.
Yet somehow it all fails to catch fire. The writing is excellent and the ideas are certainly there, but the story just takes too long. There are too many switchbacks in the plot and the science/fantasy setting starts to wear thin as the same old mysteries and truths keep coming around again and again
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Bear's worst sci-fi: bleak, repetitive, boring
Having read fifteen of Bear's science fiction novels and two of his own short story collections, I considered myself very well versed in the books which Bear produced. Read more
Published 7 months ago by M-I-K-E 2theD
Dreadful
A dreadful, vain, self-indulgent, amateurish book.
Thinly-characterised, filled with mere anecdote, drowned in scenery, and devoid of plot. Read more
Thinly-characterised, filled with mere anecdote, drowned in scenery, and devoid of plot. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Mr. Allan P. Gay
The worst pile of boring rubbish I've ever read.
I am so relieved to hear that that this author has slipped on this one. I love sci-fi and this was my first Greg Bear book. Read more
Published 13 months ago by James Clow
Overwheming grandeur
This is a long and very ambitious book dealing with some difficult and fairly arcane ideas concerning the deep structure of existence. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Gareth Power
The most boring novel since A Report on Probability A
Quite an achievement. Perhaps a better knowledge of the Hindu pantheon would have made it more interesting, but I doubt it. Read more
Published 22 months ago by MAB
Breathtaking
The scope of this book is nothing less than breathtaking. The stories are tightly interlinked and occasionally I had to go back to remember where a certain character was, but the... Read more
Published on 6 Nov 2009 by Darryl Godfrey
Greg goofed on this one!
I read the first 90 pages and stopped. What did I just read? I went back and read them again. It was no help. Read more
Published on 8 Aug 2009 by Richard Pacheco
Truly an Awful Book
I am, as are most people who have ever read any Greg Bear, a massive fan. His science & inventiveness in *all* his previous books is rarely paralleled by other authors. Read more
Published on 18 Jun 2009 by S. Hodgson
The End of Everything
In some ways, this book harks back to some works like Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, dealing as it does with an incredibly vast sweep of time and across the bounds of the entire... Read more
Published on 18 May 2009 by Patrick Shepherd
ThistleH
Having read most of his earlier works a I found this one slow to start and dificult to understand ,indeed Quite a challange but thoughly enjoy the journey .
Published on 13 May 2009 by Mr. Richard Monk
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