Product Description

Do you dream of a city at the end of time? In a time like the present, on a world that may or may not be our own, three young people-Ginny, Jack, and Daniel-dream of a fabulous, decadent city in the distant future: the Kalpa. The dreams of Ginny and Jack 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 retroengineered to possess qualities of ancient humanity. In turn, the dreams of Tiadba and Jebrassy carry them back, into the minds of Jack and Ginny. As for Daniel: he dreams of an empty darkness--all 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 they are each guardians of an object whose origins and purpose are unknown, a gnarled, stony artifact called a sum-runner that persists unchanged through all versions of time. They can save the future, but they are being hunted down.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #168616 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
"Readers who've been waiting for more than a decade for Bear to return to the visionary epics of the EON or FORGE OF GOD series had better hold on to their hats." (LOCUS )

"A master of modern science fiction returns to his very best. The book combines the crystalline clarity of Bear's own Eon with the poignant, epochal vision of Clarke's City and the Stars. Full of ambition, full of wonder, this may be remembered as Bear's masterpiece. If you loved Arthur C Clarke - if you loved Bear's Eon - you'll love this. This book will open doors in your mind." (Stephen Baxter )

"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." (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY )

"Greg Bear's most epic novel yet. An ingenious ambitious and refreshingly different novel." (Dave Golder SFX )

"Bear's vision is vast - a mind spinning fusion of hard SF, fantasy and myth. The story is detailed, complex and moving, and grips the reader with a good old fashioned sense of wonder." (THE GUARDIAN )

"Greg Bear weaves several story strands into a gripping, original tale." (NEW SCIENTIST )

About the Author
Greg Bear is the author of more than thirty books of science fiction and fantasy. Awarded two Hugos and five Nebulas for his fiction, he is one of only two authors to win a Nebula in every category. He lives in the USA.

Customer Reviews

Maybe he was having a bad day when he wrote this!!!
I found the book hard work and it was like one of those awful films that you just have to finish in order to see what happens with the hope it will get better!! I thought the characters were shallow and rather dull and frankly I didn't really care if they died or not!! It kept jumping about all over the place and I lost interest after the first 100 pages - unfortunately I was on a 12hr flight with nothing else to read!!! The ending was pretty uninteresting too - I have given it to a charity shop!!!! I love some of his other books so hopefully it's just a blip!!!!

City at the End of Time
Okay, only four and a half stars, but i opted for five not four because this is a truly magnificent, tho' difficult, book. Greg Bear has written some great SF; but i, at least, have found his recent work less exciting. This is Bear returning with a huge metaphysical vision, greater in its depth than even his 'The Way' series ('Eon', 'Eternity', and 'Legacy'). The story takes place in two time zones, now, and one hundred trillion years in the future in the eponymous city at the end of time; there is also a third arena, somewhere where there is no time, or, perhaps, all times - the chaos.
Bear has tried to imagine a universe where the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is given its most literal reading: "All the possible pathways a particle can take - or a human - an infinite number, spread out through all space and time, weak where improbable, strong where probable - all, in the end, collapsing into a single, energy-efficient path, the most resourceful and simplest world-line." I'm not sure what he means by "in the end collapsing into a single [...] path" because three of the important characters from our time have the ability to jump to alternate realities in an attempt to improve their lot. But one can't blame Bear for a bit of fuzziness here, no-one can make sense of quantum mechanics when it comes to what it means (that's according to Richard Feynman in his 'QED' - and who are we to argue with him?).
At the end of time reality as we know it has almost been destroyed by the chaos - an empty horrific meaningless force which subverts all that we know as sanity and order. Indeed, it has devoured all bar the final city - the city at the end of time. Time, within such quantum multiverse, is not fixed - start in the middle of a story, go back to the beginning, return to where you started but you'll find it's no longer the same. The essence of this story is how one of the mighty beings at the end of time - the sort of being Bear imagines a person who had had tens of trillions of years in control of their own nature might turn into - is struggling against the chaos. It's giving nothing important away to say that the alternative world jumping characters in our time are, unbeknownst to them, part of his struggle.
Any hack can tell a story with `amazing' beings in it: "His mind was godlike - as beyond ours as ours is to a beetle's." Bear is a truly great SF writer because he goes so much further, giving us the feeling that we really have glimpsed something of the incomprehensible. I was worried, as the story progressed, that there were going to be too many loose ends - beings and objects named but not described. It's true that not everything is tied up by the end, but nearly everything is. What i would have liked, tho', is a lengthy appendix with a more detailed break down of the metaphysics and ontology of this great created world.
Apart from that little quibble, this is a wonderful wonderful work of hard SF from one of our greatest living visionaries.

Hard going and ultimately not worth the work
It's taken me several days to get down to writing this, because I really hate doing it. I had had great expectations of this book, based on the authors previous work, and first impressions were promising - some odd characters and a setting, in part, in the unimaginably distant future. However, the further I got into the book the harder going I found it. I eventually finished it, and the facile ending (I won't spoil it) left me wishing I hadn't bothered. Perhaps the author was as fed up with the book as I was by the time he got to the end. Part of the difficulty I had was the constant leaps from one viewpoint character to another, but this, in itself, was surely not enough. Maybe it was the odd characters with odd, and inadequately explained, motivations. Perhaps it was the future, which, to me, never really made much sense. Or the mysterious threat, equally senseless. Sorry, I don't know. What I do know is that there is the germ of the masterpiece the back cover proclaims, but that this book is not it.