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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Earth-shattering!, 4 Aug 2000
I stumbled across Greg Bear and this book about 3 years ago. It really blew me away! I have re-read the book a couple of times and the emotion of the finale still bites too deep for comfort. Who says hard sci-fi cannot be for the heart as well as the head... The reworkings and discarding of familiar sci-fi themes is very clever and makes you continually have to reevaluate the book as you read on. If you have not already read this book, BUY IT! Then go out and buy EON. The only guy giving Bear a run for his money is Peter Hamilton (Reality Dysfunction, et al). It does not get better than this.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not a page wasted, 27 Jan 2006
A fast-paced rollercoaster of a novel from Bear which builds inexorably to its inevitable climax.
In a theme later to be picked up by Alastair Reynolds and Jack McDevitt, Bear introduces us to the concept of the ‘culling’ of Humanity while painting a portrait of a civilisation faced with its imminent destruction.
Like many Bear novels it build slowly, gathers momentum and rushes to a breathtaking climax.
It’s a multi-character narrative, revolving around the central figure of Arthur Gordon, cosmologist and scientific advisor to the President.
Two spaceships disguised as natural rock formations are simultaneously discovered in the USA and Australia. One carries a dying alien who tells of the Earth’s imminent destruction by machine intelligences, while the Australian ship disgorges three gourd-shaped robots who preach of sharing their scientific knowledge with humanity.
President Crockerman, shaken by his meeting with the alien, bestows a religious significance on the events and deduces that Mankind is about to be judged by God.
Subsequently, while two black-hole-like neutronium pellets penetrate the Earth, racing toward a violent collision at the core, a second faction of extra-terrestrials makes itself known, able only to save a portion of humanity while fighting the predations of the ‘planet-eaters’.
Bear, to be fair, goes out of his way to portray a world beyond the borders of the US. One of the main characters for instance is the British Science Fiction writer, Trevor Hicks, who is shown to be far more level-headed and rational than the President.
It’s an interesting First Contact story in that we do not get to discover those with whom contact has been made. The creatures of the arks and the robot spiders only reveal themselves as bronze humanoid avatars, while the nature of the ‘planet eaters’ remains a mystery.
Despite its rapid pace and huge ideas (Europa, which disappears at the beginning of the novel, has been dismantled by benign aliens and its ice being used to terraform Mars and Venus) it is a novel about people, well-rounded, three-dimensional, often flawed but fully human, faced with the destruction of everything they know.
The denouement is shocking, compelling, transcendent and leaves one wanting more.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the greatest and most epic sci-fi stories of all time, 11 July 2000
I read The Forge of God over the course of a single weekend (yes, sad but true) and have to say that it's the most fantastic, epic and disturbing book I've read in many, many years. The build-up is well-paced, the character's are all fully believable and the finale is as epic (and as depressing) as it gets. Bear's sequel, Anvil Of Stars, is just as impressive. This is crying out to be made into a film with a good sci-fi director (Scott, Cameron, Hyams, Fincher) at the helm, along with Bear's classic 'Eon'. Although Bear prefers to keep on writing epic, near-future sci-fi such as his brilliant new Darwin's Radio, perhaps he could consider taking time-out to carefully develop The Forge of God into a screenplay. Putting images to this fabulous story would be the icing on the cake (that's if Bear's infamous 'Planet Eaters' don't gobble it up first)
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