A "review" of Greg Bear's The Forge of God

Quite by accident, I happened to start thinking about Greg Bear's The Forge of God today. For those who haven't read it, it's yet another rockin' tale about the end of the world.

I guess I adore apocalypse fiction in general.

I've never given much thought to the ideas Bear puts forth in the novel. At the time I read it, I was too wound up in the novelty of such a thing: I was reading it concurrently with the dates given in the story and one of the protagonists visits the campus of my alma mater. I think I'd like to revisit the story and perhaps page through it again. I remember it being entirely too long for the subject at hand as a lot of characters hemmed and hawed about the implications of their assured destruction at the hands of an unseen force from beyond the moon.

Perhaps I was a bit too rash.

The idea I liked most about The Forge of God was that Earth's demise is not a swift, sudden event like in that trainwreck of plausibility, Independence Day. It starts off slow, and builds gradually for a few weeks until trained eyes discern a pattern of behavior that concludes with the wise men of words saying "That ain't right. That shouldn't be."

First, one of Jupiter's moons goes missing. Not "we can't see it". Not "it's gone behind another moon". It's just gone. (For those who would appreciate such a thing, the moon in question is Europa, Arthur C. Clarke's choice for redemption in 2010: Odyssey Two.)

On Earth, a mountain appears where no mountain used to be. No one can pinpoint precisely when it turned up, either, aside from the fact that it was never there before.

Eventually, multiple phenomena start to correlate and a little green man pops up and freaks out the U.S. President by telling him that a) the world is doomed, and b) E.T. doesn't exactly go to church on Sundays.

It becomes apparent that there is a war between worlds going on: one race has decided all sentient life should be destroyed, and another that believes that first race is full of jackasses. (The parallel between this philosophy and that of the black Ur-Quan, the "Kohr-Ah", in Star Control II is interesting.) The little green man has come to incite a panic while his force of tiny, self-replicating robot spiders bite innocent humans who all then begin the laborious process of preparing escape vehicles to remove a select subset of people and information from the planet before things go boom.

And these are the good guys.

At first I was worried that I was going to ruin this book for anyone who hasn't read it yet. Then I realized that the movie Deep Impact pretty much shows you the asteroid impact in the trailer, so if you go into the theater and are surprised that the film ends with lots and lots of people dying, well then you're just being obtuse. People die in The Forge of God. Earth done gits itseff blowed up. The great thing about this book is how it happens. Bear can sometimes be preachy or maudlin about how people cope with death, but I think it's because his characters are being that way. If he spends a lot of time going over multiple points of view, it is because he has introduced a veritable shitload of ancillary characters who have to have their say. In the final days, families get separated, people cope with loading folks onto the exodus ships knowing full well that they themselves aren't on the guest list, and others just fret about finding a quiet place in the woods where they can relax, cry, and welcome their fate.

Interestingly, Bear doesn't go into a huge amount of detail about the aliens or their motives. Even when pushed to define a moral standpoint by the Commander-in-Chief, Bear's spaceman simply evades the question by purporting to "believe in punishment". You, the reader, never really find out what prompted Bear's Kohr-Ah, if I may borrow the name, to start going psycho on every last inhabited planet they could find. Nor do I recall any real motivation on behalf of the good guys to help out a doomed world. I am unaware if these two races get names in the book, but in the (supposedly) horrendous sequel, they are called the Killers and the Benefactors. I'd be insulted by this total lack of explanation by Bear if not for the fact that science fiction authors love jerking their readers' chains around like this. Sagan pretty much gave himself immunity in Contact by having each character's story fail to match any other, and thus the expedition as a whole was discredited. "Experience is subjective." Whoops. Sorry, reader. Looks like you got snookered. In the film, the message was even more of a slap in the face. One character, one story, right? Right. "What did the alien say?" "It said this is a first step for our species." "And why did it send us the Machine?" "Because that's the way it's always been done." Oh, hell yes! Let's all do what the Vegan space monster says because it's fuckin' tradition! Whoo!

At this point, I realize this has ceased to be a review or a reminiscence about Bear's novel. So I will end by telling you that there's also a telepathic game of wits between a giant computer and a guy with a suitcase nuke. If that doesn't spur your interest to read The Forge of God, nothing will.