A hell of a lot of characters, lots of scientists and “sciency” stuff, a family on the verge of being torn apart, a dying friend, a president in trouble and duplicitous aliens. Lonely men ending up with Nordic beauties and strangely empty cities and national parks. ( )

SPOILER ALERT: In The Forge of God, Earth is stealthily invaded by two warring sets of aliens, one in California and another in Australia. One set promises a future of interstellar trade. The other group says their competitors will destroy the planet but hope to rescue a few people to perpetuate the species. All the aliens we meet are self-replicating machines. The story provides a panorama of human responses to the existential threat. Notably, the U.S. president has a religious crisis, loses his cool, and is impeached. Greg Bear seems to be in dialogue with the work of Arthur C. Clarke, especially Childhood’s End. Forge was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards. It lost the Hugo Award to David Brin’s The Uplift War, a novel of comparable quality and scope. The Nebula went to Pat Murphy for The Falling Woman, a psychological fantasy based on Mayan culture. ( )

26 de junio de 1996: Europa, la sexta luna de Júpiter, desaparece repentinamente de los cielos, sin dejar tras de sí la menor huella de su existencia.
28 de septiembre de 1996: en el Valle de la Muerte, en California, en pleno corazón de los Estados Unidos, aparece un cono de escoria volcánica que no se halla registrado en ningún mapa geológico de la zona, y a su lado es hallada una criatura alienígena que transmite un inquietante mensaje: «Traigo malas noticias: la Tierra va a ser destruida...»
1 de octubre de 1996: el gobierno australiano anuncia que una enorme montaña de granito, un duplicado casi perfecto de Ayers Rock, ha aparecido de pronto en el Gran Desierto Victoria; junto a ella, tres resplandecientes robots de acero traen consigo un mensaje de paz y amistad...
Así se inicia una de las más apasionantes novelas de ciencia ficción de los últimos tiempos, que combina sabiamente el interés científico, la alta política internacional y la amenaza de una invasión alienígena, para ofrecernos una obra apasionante con una profundidad temática raras veces alcanzada, que se lee de un tirón hasta la última página.

Once again, Greg Bear delivers an epic tale. I read the sequel to this, "Anvil of the Stars", 1st - simply b/c I came across it 1st. In my GR review of that (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/464609.Anvil_of_Stars) I call it "grandiose" & remark on the scale. I think this novel impressed me EVEN MORE in that regard.

Bear has quite the imagination to be able to envision such an end to the Earth - & I'm happy to say that the End of the World here means just that - not just the death of most of humanity. Imagine being an ant living in an ant colony while a nuclear war rages around it. Different ants have different perceptions about what's going on, the more talented & remarkable ants may even gather info somehow from distant relatives - trying to piece together what's happening, trying to see if their own colony is about to be destroyed & if there's a way to save it. Here you have the plight of the humans in this bk.

Highly skilled people in positions of great access to info start getting fragments of a puzzle. Bear's construction of this puzzle is 'masterly'. Both the characters & the readers try to solve the puzzle. Things look grim - but are they REALLY grim? Yep, indeed, they are. This bk has so many characters, a plethora of viewpoints, all sorts of possibilities explored. Even so, it's still basically English-speaking-culture-centric. Mind you, I'm not complaining - even constructing this bk thusly is impressive.

Alas, I'll probably never give a Bear novel a 5-star rating (stupid though the whole rating thing is) b/c the writing itself is mostly uninspired. James Joyce & Vladimir Nabokov he ain't. Still, the ideas are abundant & explored w/ excellence. This is the sort of bk I read when other things that I'm reading (2 bks that I'm trying to read right now in particular) are slowing me down. "The Forge of God" was a quick read (despite its 473 pp) & a thoroughly enjoyable one too.

A somewhat trivial sidenote is that Bear falls into the misuse-of-anarchy trap on page 471. It's also such a disappointment when otherwise intelligent people are more gung ho about government than they are about individual responsibility.

Otherwise, just reading thru this & having Bear's enormity of concept gradually reveal itself is a delight. ( )

By no means a good book, but it's enjoyable and almost always holds one's attention.

The drawbacks are those common enough in airport novels: pointless descriptions (Bear is especially fond of detailing people's appearance--height, build, degree of balding), dodgy diction ('an unenthused wrist') descriptions and terms that call to mind an author's boning up on relevant subjects. There's a problem with balance, as well; e.g. the very long description. of characters' idyllic visit to Yosemite Park whilst er there's an interesting apocalypse going on. To be fair, though, Bear doesn't throw in brand names and hot sexy babes, he forbears following up the thriller elements and despite the inclusion of a dying friend and a beloved child he doesn't sink into sentimentailty. I can't imagine caring two straws about any of the characters but to me at least that doesn't matter one whit; in fact, I'm more bothered by characters being content with eating hamburgers, boiled eggs, and iceberg lettuce despite knowing that their meals are numbered.

The ominous slowly-revealed threat to the earth is dead cool as is the nature of the helpers, the Guardians. The newspaper article in the denouement is a bit too cliched for my taste: Yay humanity! And though that doesn't quite give the book a Hollywood ending, I'd have preferred I think a passage showing POV of the guardians/babysitters putting the existence of humans in perspective.

A satisfying book. It won't set you pondering but it has more substance than do those books best read when down with a case of flu.