Product Description

Multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, Greg Bear is one of science fiction’s most accomplished writers. Bold scientific speculation, riveting plots, and a fierce humanism reflected in characters who dare to dream of better worlds distinguish his work. Now Bear has written a mind-bendingly epic novel that may well be his masterpiece.

Do you dream of a city at the end of time?

In a time like the present, in a world that may or may not be our own, three young people–Ginny, Jack, and Daniel–dream of a doomed, decadent city of the distant future: the Kalpa. Ginny’s and Jack’s dreams 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 retro-engineered to possess qualities of ancient humanity. As for Daniel: He dreams of an empty darkness–all that 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 each guards an object whose origin and purpose are unknown: gnarled, stony artifacts called sum-runners that persist unchanged through all versions of time.

Hunted by others with similar powers who seek the sum-runners on behalf of a terrifying, goddess-like entity known as the Chalk Princess, Ginny, Jack, and Daniel are drawn, despite themselves, into an all but hopeless mission to rescue the future–and complete the greatest achievement in human history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #201209 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-05
• Released on: 2008-08-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his triumphant return to large-scale SF, Nebula and Hugo–winner Bear (Quantico) links three young drifters in present-day Seattle with an unimaginably distant future. When the drifters answer an odd newspaper advertisement, they soon find themselves caught up in a war between mysterious and powerful forces. Two not-quite-humans, creations of a million-year experiment, have discovered that their ancient fortress/city, perhaps the last refuge of intelligence in a dying universe, is about to fall before the onslaught of chaos. They have been chosen by beings evolved far beyond mere matter to undertake a dangerous mission to preserve the universe's last vestiges of consciousness. Somehow the two groups engage in telepathic communication despite the eons that separate them. Something of an homage to William Hope Hodgson's classic The Night Land, this complex, difficult and beautifully written tale will appeal to sophisticated readers who prefer thorny conundrums to fast-paced action. (Aug.)
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From Booklist
In a post-human future, one city, guarded by reality generators and surrounded by the terrible maelstrom of Chaos, is the sole bastion of order. In our time, three people who can alter the course of fate, a murky past, and the dreams of a decaying city at the end of time are brought together by a newspaper ad and into the hands of collectors of their kind. Back in the future, the strange characters include keepers and the Librarian, who seek to protect history, and others who welcome Chaos. As the lines of fate and possibility collapse toward inevitability, the three fateshifters resort to the tenuous protection of a Seattle warehouse full of books as a storm that threatens to destroy everything approaches. If the trio survives and holds onto memory through the disaster, memory will begin again, the long decay of reality will end, and mysteries will be solved in the eye of the storm. Fascinating. --Regina Schroeder

Review
PRAISE FOR GREG BEAR

City at the End of Time

“Lyrical, beautiful, and set one hundred trillion years after the heat death of the universe.”
–Jeff Bezos, chairman and CEO, Amazon.com

“Bear is one of our greatest science fiction writers.”
–Vernor Vinge, award-winning author of Rainbows End

Quantico

“An adrenaline-amped thriller that will scare the hell out of you.”
–Robert Crais

“As impossible to let go of as a live wire.”
–The Seattle Times

Dead Lines

“A really excellent novel.”
–Stephen King

Darwin’s Radio

“A frightening new wrinkle in human evolution . . . Darwin’s Radio delivers the kind of narrative kick that distinguishes such novels as Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“A masterpiece . . . Fascinating.”
–USA Today


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

Lacks structure and pace
I very much wanted to like this book. It's not easy to summon up a believable city one hundred trillion years from now. Greg Bear's multiverse is collapsing into terminal degeneracy as the Chaos intrudes upon the last city - the Kalpa - on a twisted surreal earth.

In present-day Seattle, characters Jack, Ginny and Daniel possess "sum runners", mysterious Feynmanesque stones which will eventually be found to code the innermost ordering principles of reality. But our heroes have lost all memory of their origins, and spend their lives flitting between alternative realities of the multiverse, in endless flight from ill-defined threats.

Ten to the fourteen years out, the male warrior Jebrassy and female explorer Tiadba are groomed to leave the Kalpa for a one-way journey through the Chaos to the mythical city of Nataraja - somehow this is the Kalpa's last and best hope. Jebrassy and Jack, and Tiadba and Ginny, are psychologically linked through the Terayears and will physically meet at the novel's climax, when the universe may, or may not, be cyclically renewed.

Bear has ransacked Greek, Hindu and Buddhist mythologies for this story, along with a light dusting of quantum mechanics. Typhon, the personification of Chaos, is the Greek Satan-like figure; Nataraja is the dancing posture of the Hindu God Shiva, lord of destruction/transformation; in Buddhism, a great kalpa is 1.28 trillion years long.

OK, so does it all work? I personally found it hard work. The book is dense with repetitious description of chaotic landscapes, which sap the reader's patience. For much of the time the main characters are engaging in relatively mundane activities or trying to get from one place to another in situations devoid of much tension.

All this could be forgiven - there are plenty of hard-to-read books out there - if there was some subtle and profound point Bear was trying to communicate. I really struggle though. At the end, when identities are resolved and the threads of events have been drawn together, what have we learned that is deeper then simply another drawn-out fantasy-SF-action thriller? I fear the answer is nothing.

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 cosmos (and beyond). At the same time, embedded within it are some of the latest thoughts and theories about just what makes universe be what it is, from quantum entanglement, the many universes concept, to observer based determination of what the world is and will be.

It starts in the incredibly far future, and the described situation at this starting point is intriguing as we see what's left of humanity (or human-like beings) confined to a small area and fighting a losing battle with Chaos. This early section may be the best part of this book, as everything is weird and new, and hints at the history and genesis of the current situation are dropped into the descriptions of this very odd environ, making for an absorbing interaction between reader and words.

Interspersed with this far-future world is the second major thread of this novel, as we return to the world of today and follow three very unique individuals as they try to figure out just where they fit in the world, why they are being hunted (and by what), what they can do with their special abilities, and just what the connection is between these people and those of the far future.

Up to this point, all very good. But as we proceed deeper into this work, problems appear. First is the language used to describe the Chaos. In the hands of someone like Delany or Zelazny, this could have been a treat, but Bear's descriptions have two deadly faults: a lack of definition, a haziness, no scintillating concrete images that you can wrap your mind around; and constant use of the same words and language to describe this non-image - everything is dry, cracked, melted, crushed, twisted, crazed, dim, and dark. As this type of material occupies a large portion of the second half of the novel, it becomes a definite slog to continue reading these same non-descriptions of hazy somethings again and again.

The problem of lack of definition also applies to the major characters, as I found little to make these people stand out as living, breathing things, or why I should care about their ultimate fate. Part of this due to the fact that all of them are manipulated by various `higher powers' to fix the paths and decisions they will make, and the basic motivations of these higher powers are themselves not well delineated till very near the end of the book.

Then there is the final resolution of the two major threads of this work. I found it to be totally predictable both in terms of the decisions of the major characters and the ultimate conclusion of the entire story arc, not good for a work whose major premise deals with choice, unpredictability, and the infinite possibilities of all possible universe world-lines.

This work needed some severe pruning of most of the descriptive sections, and deeper, more fleshed out looks at the internals of its characters. As it is, I found it hard to finish this work, and was left with quite a feeling of disappointment.

---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Unreadable
It is extremely rare for me to give up on a book but I found this title by Greg Bear to be pretty much completely unreadable. I've liked most of his past work but this has no developed characters, a confusing, un-intelligible plot, and boring imagery. Two thumbs down.