I haven't read much Greg Bear. Most of the books of his that I've picked up just haven't sounded interesting. I finally picked up "The Forge of God".
It starts with the disappearance of Europa. Then new geologic formations show up which are just space craft in disguise. One kind of alien comes out of one and another kind of alien comes out of the other. One claims to bring great technology and the other claims he comes to save the planet from the other aliens. Then little mechanical spiders start showing up and taking over people... or networking them to better organize resistance. Two asteroids then hit the Earth. One of neutronium and one of anti-neutronium. They're on a slowly decaying orbit inside the Earth. Some of the people who have been nabbed by the spiders start gathering animals, books, and scientific records. The President gives up completely and tells people to just give up and wait to die.
Basically there's two batches of aliens fighting over Earth, or maybe just one alien messing with us, and the humans have no idea what's going on.
I'll put the conclusion in the Comments for those of you who want to see it.
I didn't really like this book. I don't know why. I didn't dislike it. It just sort of left me flat. What I look for in science fiction is a good story well told and some hard science. This didn't have much science. Some, but not much. What there was was good enough. The story was new but not told in a way that engaged me. It's not one of my highly recommended books.
1 comment:
There were two factions operating. I think one was an automated planet destroying device and the other was trying to fight the planet destroyers and relocate the people from the worlds that were doomed.
Europa was destroyed by the rescuers and smashed into Mars and Venus to begin terraforming them.
The neutronium and anti-neutronium asteroids slowly decayed in their orbits and met at the Earth's core destroying the planet.
The spider things picked out a few tens of thousands of the people they'd tapped into and lifted them and as much animal life and scientific knowledge as they could off the planet before it blew up. A handful of them watched the Earth get torn apart.
~300 years later Mars was calming down from being hit by a piece of Europa. The storms were over, the atmosphere was thickening, and simple life transplanted from Earth was starting to spreading. Some of the surviving humans were taken out of suspended animation and start to make a life on their new planet. Another party is going to explore Venus which still needs some time to be ready for people. Yet another party is going with the spiders to bring the planet killers to justice. Yes, the planet killers have matured in the untold centuries since they released their machines and they regret what they did, but the law is the law.
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