City At The End Of Time by
Greg Bear
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
This is an interesting book, but overall a pretty difficult read. Others have pointed out that this is a retelling of William Hope Hodgson's
The Night Land. This is true, in a way. Bear even mentions that book obliquely in a passage where the speaker says something to the effect of he went in search of a man who wrote of The Last Redoubt, only to find that he'd been killed in WWI. The plot is not really a redo of that book, however. While both books deal with a city that stands alone against the forces that wish to destroy what little remains of humanity, that's about the end of the similarities.
This city, we soon come to find out, stands as the last bastion of humanity in a universe where time itself is running down. The Chaos has eaten away all the rest of the universe except for the three cities of humanity which remain. It's not a bad setup, really. While you could imagine that there might be some celestial salvation for the people in The Last Redoubt, there will be none for those living in The Kalpa as the universe breathes its last breath. In one of these cities, part of the story follows two "ancient breeds", beings who are designed as throwbacks to earlier variations of humanity, although the time when humans held fleshly form was so long ago it cannot even be counted in the trillions of years. These two breeds, Jebrassy and Tiadba, are determined to break out of the boundaries of their world and go forth beyond the city walls to find out what lies beyond. Meanwhile, at a time which is roughly the present, three travelers of ambiguous origin and intent come to Seattle, where they are drawn for some purpose, although they don't know what.
And basically, after that, not much makes sense. I hate to put it that way, but even at the end it seems hard to understand exactly what happened. That Chaos had squeezed time from both the end and the beginning, destroying history and futurity at the same time, is strange, but understandable. But aside from the fact that the architect of the universe's salvation planned to basically cause a new one to be born, it's hard to understand how that plan was supposed to happen. I really didn't understand what the sum-runners were, what the point of the numbers was, who the Livid Mistress was or why she was collecting people, and how the collectors had partners that could do things like control wasps, fire, or whatever. He gave no real explanations, just lots and lots of details that shed no light.
As far as whether the plot was compelling in any way, it really wasn't. For one, jumping back and forth between points of view of people for whom nothing was happening hardly drove the story along, and it was probably about halfway through the book when any significant events actually occurred.
Now, this review probably makes it seem like I didn't enjoy the book, but if I hadn't enjoyed it at all, I certainly wouldn't give it three stars. I felt that the story was a good idea and Bear's writing was actually fairly smooth. The characters actually seemed to have their own personalities so they were easy to identify. I didn't always know what was going on, but I thought his descriptions were pretty good and the book was very inventive, so I enjoyed it well enough.
All in all, it's a bit too long for being so incomprehensible. I can only take that in shorter doses. I have never read another Greg Bear, although I did skim through Blood Music a while ago. I guess you might have a more favorable opinion if you're a big Bear fan, or not. I would not recommend this to anyone who's not a hardcore sci-fi fan, and probably not most of them. If you're into seriously apocalyptic sci-fi, this might be something to add to your reading list.
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