Hegira [Mass Market Paperback]

Greg Bear's SF career didn't really take off until Blood Music (1985), whose shorter 1983 version won the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella. Hegira is his first journeyman novel from 1979, already showing a fondness for colossal scale and boggling surprises, but slightly clumsy in the telling--"top-heavy with explanations", said the SF Encyclopedia--despite substantial revision in 1987.

Hegira is the overly apt name of a vast and evidently hollow artificial world moving on an immense journey to somewhere unimaginable. After countless generations in transit the inhabitants have only limited access to the knowledge of the "First-Born" builders, which is inscribed on the sides of 1,000-kilometre obelisks with elementary texts at ground level, advanced material higher up, and real secrets beyond the reach of balloon ascent. Later, in order to make more information available, an obelisk helpfully falls over and causes untold devastation. Meanwhile, brief glimpses of stars appear for the first time in the black night sky...

Driven by legends about what needs to be done when a loved one is frozen in mirror-skinned stasis, three pilgrims go seeking the Wall surrounding this segment of Hegira, beyond which lies the Land Where Night Is A River. Here the planet itself speaks and explains the very complicated history and cosmology behind the story of Hegira. Journey's end approaches, and "The stars were here to stay". It is colourful and readable, even if Bear's ambition clearly bit off more than his 1979 writing skills could chew. --David Langford

A planetary romance by one of hard sf's great writers

Almost three-quarters of a million miles around, Hegira has, against all the laws of physics, Earth-normal gravity; its different races have a common history: all the accumulated knowledge of the First-born, graven on giant Obelisks that rise up out of sight to the sky, beyond mankind's powers to reach and read. But as knowledge advances, so the enigmas of Hegira's nature become grew steadily more impossible to explain or to understand. The ill-assorted trio who embark on their personal quests know little of their planet's oddities and care less . . . until Hegira's changeless mysteries begin to alter; until the first great Obelisk tumbles.

SALES POINTS * 'Arthur C. Clarke's most formidable rival yet' The Times * 'A writer of compelling talent' New Statesman ' * 'One of the best of this generation's idea writers' David Brin