Customer Reviews
How disappointing - By: Mr. A. Taylor-Bennett, 05 Oct 2008 
I agree with one of the other reviewers; I wanted to like this book. I enjoyed SF some years ago and, reading a good account of this novel in a sunday newspaper, invested in the hardback as a holiday read feeling that it could reawaken some of my enjoyment of the genre. I found it unspeakably pretentious & remarkably poorly constructed. It completely lost its way about three quarters the way through! How damning is it when you are desperate to finish a book, but not because of any enjoyment, its narrative thrust or a sense of 'wow, how's it going to end?!' but because you've already invested so much into it that you simply will not let the last 30 pages beat you. But, oh dear, those 30 tedious last pages took their toll. I reallly couldn't have given a damn if the whole universe came to an end by the last few chapters - in fact I remember wishing it was going to be sooner rather than later.
Too many good ideas & virtuallly no literary merit.
City at the End of Time - By: Jonathan H. Morison, 15 Sep 2008 
Okay, only four & 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', & 'Legacy'). The story takes place in two time zones, now, & 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, alll 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 alll space & time, weak where improbable, strong where probable - alll, in the end, collapsing into a single, energy-efficient path, the most resourceful & 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' - & 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 alll that we know as sanity & order. Indeed, it has devoured alll 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 reallly have glimpsed something of the incomprehensible. I was worried, as the story progressed, that there were going to be too many loose ends - beings & 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 & 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.
'Bearly' worth the struggle! - By: Daniel Hargreaves, 09 Sep 2008 
I had high hopes for Bear's latest; with 'Anvil of Stars' I felt he managed the very tough trick of marrying macro-space opera dynamics with micro-scale human drama, & was expecting the same here. Sadly Bear chooses mind-boggling boudary-pushing over narrative drive & sympathetic characters, leaving the reader adrift on a speculative stew of hard science, religion & philosophy which would tax the brain - & patience - of even the most slavish acolyte.
Bear's 'sum runners' are a glum lot, by their very nature anonymous, & one is never led to care much for their plight. Their far-future counterparts, while given more emotional terrain to inhabit, are also thinly sketched, & serve merely as helpless pawns in their masters' grand scheme. Frustratingly, the most interesting passages of the book, detailing the mass wars & Sangmer's journey, are merely brief chapters which serve to establish Bear's future mythology, & if expanded would have made fine novels themselves. Instead, Bear's priority is depicting the end (and subsequent beginning) of reality & alll of its attendant quasi-religious hubbub, which grates coming from an author with such a fine pedigree of hard sci fi writing.
In the end, like time itself, the reader's brain is in danger of becoming so much grey mush...
Very Poor - By: SelenaH, 08 Sep 2008 I have been a fan of Greg Bear's work for many years now, & I consider EON & Forge of God books among the best science fiction I have read.
However this book has more in common with his fantasy writings in Songs of Earth & Power. There is some science buried in here, but it is merely a thin sprinkling to try to give some background to the fantastical (dare I say nonsensical) elements.
There are too many boring & confusing threads to be weaved & pulled together at the end. I'm sure this alll made sense in the authors mind, but it is a laborious exercise to try & read it.
Let's hope Mr Bear gets back on form soon, but I'm afraid this effort was a huge disappointment.
Hard going and ultimately not worth the work - By: DGT, 01 Sep 2008 
It's taken me several days to get down to writing this, because I reallly hate doing it. I had had great expectations of this book, based on the authors previous work, & first impressions were promising - some odd characters & a setting, in part, in the unimaginably distant future. However, the further I got into the book the harder going I found it. I eventuallly finished it, & 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, & inadequately explained, motivations. Perhaps it was the future, which, to me, never reallly made much sense. Or the mysterious threat, equallly 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.
