Conference noted::sf

626.0. "The Forge of God" by SHORTY::REDFORD () Thu May 26 1988 02:40

    by Greg Bear
    Tor SF, first printing Sept '87, paperback June '88 (but Wordsworth
       in Cambridge gets things early)
    
    A catastrophe novel that's only worth reading for the 
    ending.   Arthur Gordon, ex-Presidential Science Advisor,  hears some
    odd news at a cocktail party: Europa has disappeared.  The sixth 
    moon of Jupiter has suddenly vanished.  Other portents appear: a
    new volcanic cinder cone appears in Death Valley that isn't on 
    any of the charts, and a clone of Ayers Rock appears in the Australian
    outback.  Signs, of course, of alien invasion, but one of the most
    spectacularly destructive invasions I've ever read of.  The novel 
    follows Gordon and a handful of other characters in the traditional
    "Lucifer's Hammer" style.  
    
    Unfortunately, most of the characters ring false and too much 
    time is spent on them.  We're forced to put up with this uninteresting
    crew while the events of the invasion take place.  It's like being
    stuck in a bus with a crowd of chattering tourists as magnificent 
    scenery rolls by.  The plot, too, is riddled with holes.  Bear 
    has a couple of interesting ideas here, but they're more suited 
    to a novella than a 500 page novel.  
    
    This seems to be a consistent problem of his. "Blood Music" had
    some extraordinary scenes of intelligent bacteria living in a
    world wholly defined by chemical gradients, but he drifted off
    into vague mysticism at the end.  In "Eon" he had several striking
    images: the infinite Eighth Chamber, and Axis city with its
    population half corporeal and half in City Memory, but the plot
    had too many jarring transitions.  The first half is a
    straightforward space battle, and the second is a wild swing among
    alternate universes. It seems like he gets a vision and then tries to
    wrap a book around it.  What's frustrating is that the visions are
    often good but the wrappings poor.  He puts a diamond into bubblepack and 
    corrugated cardboard.  The climactic scene of "The Forge of God"
    almost, but not quite, makes the rest of the book worthwhile.
    
    /jlr
    
    More discussion after the spoiler formfeed:

    What bothered me most is that the events of the first half of the 
    book are casually thrown away later on.  The creature in Death 
    Valley and the robots in Australia are just dismissed as ruses.
    Why should the aliens bother with ruses?  They had nothing to do 
    with their scheme for destroying the planet.  They didn't distract
    the human race from their plans, because their plans were 
    unstoppable and indetectable.  The whole first section is just 
    filler, as far as I can tell.  Where are the editors at Tor when
    he needs them?
    
    Even the core idea of the book (destroying the planet by mutually
    annihilating masses of neutronium and anti-neutronium at the core)
    has problems.  Where did they get all that anti-neutronium from?
    It represents a fantastic amount of energy, an amount equal to the
    entire output of the Sun for 30 seconds. They couldn't have made
    it in the solar system without our noticing.  If they have that
    kind of technology, why are they bothering with the Earth at all?
    Why not mine asteroids, or comets, or even dwarf stars?  There's
    far more matter available there, and it's far easier to get to.
    For that matter, why did the aliens bother with all those
    H-bombs in the ocean trenches? Wasn't one means of wrecking the
    planet enough? 
    
    Also, why didn't the neutronium masses shoot up out the other 
    side of the Earth when they fell?  Why didn't the friendly aliens
    shoot another mass of neutronium at them to skew their orbits
    up above the surface where they could be captured?   The whole
    friendly aliens thing was too pat.  They came light-years to save
    us, but came two weeks too late.  They eat trillions of tons 
    of Europa in a matter of hours and then sit idle for four 
    months while the neutronium nears the Earth.
    
    Basically, Bear just wanted to blow up the world.  A planet has 
    so much potential energy tied up in its mass that it takes 
    something bizarre like anti-neutronium to do it.  He added the
    deus ex machina friendly aliens so he could have some human 
    spectators.  He wanted to stress the horror and tragedy of
    the death of the Earth, and so spent a lot of time on characters
    who could then be killed.  I admire the idea, but Larry Niven
    did it better in "Inconstant Moon" at one tenth the length.

RE:0 
   > A catastrophe novel that's only worth reading for the 
   > ending.   

I did not like the ending, it was exactly as I had 
speculated from the information given in the story.
I like the first half as it laid the ground work for
a very interesting possiblity that the first contact
would be both good and bad at the same time but it
ends without ever touching on the subject.

I liked "EON" but I am glad I only paid the SF book club
price for this one.

More discussion after the spoiler formfeed:



>    Unfortunately, most of the characters ring false and too much 
I would have expected a panic or people not working but the  
oh-well thats the way it will be while Rome burns.... only the blowing up of 
the volcanic cinder cone and a one man effort of hunting Metal Spiders
with a baseball bat were close to my view reality.  People would have
paniced first then given up.

The book had may possible ending  and I got hooked on the first half
thinking I would get an insight into the bad/good aliens and how the
first contact would happen etc.  At least in "EON" Bear had as you mention
several striking images: the infinite Eighth Chamber, Axis city , etc. and
then explored them, but just blowing up the world and acting like mechanical 
robots for the law was not very interesting.

    

    
    I'm told that there will be a sequel to EON. Any more news?
    
    Rikk

    Wow, this is extremely late, and has probably been answered before
    - but I checked for keywords and titles, and saw no mention of the
    sequel, which is entitle _Eternity_.  I enjoyed it immensely.  Not
    as "hard" as _Eon_, but just as captivating and interesting.
    
    - Steve