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tabone 's review for:
The Forge of God
by Greg Bear
I found Forge on a list of recommended "first contact" books. I had read one or two of Bear's books in the past, but couldn't honestly remember if I actually liked them. Now that I've finished Forge, methinks I kept away for a reason.
First and foremost, I love the really big idea sci-fi stories. I don't want super dense, super scientific 'hard' sci-fi. I want enjoyable reads that my brain turning. I want to see what decisions the author makes to unfold their own speculative approaches. And one thing I do like about Bear is his characters are pretty one-dimensional. At the scale of 'big idea' books, I'd rather not waste time on the minutiae of tiny humans when we could be talking about aliens, space travel, and cool technology. To an extent, Bear delivers on that in Forge, but on the whole, the book felt lacking in creativity. He conjured up a few concepts - competing alien narratives, the 'bullets' in the Earth, the spiders - but nothing all that special, even for having been written in 1987.
The biggest issue I have with Forge, though, was in the pacing - on two levels. First, of the book's ~460 pages, it doesn't actually pick up and get interesting until the last 60 or so. It does jump right in on page 8, I'll give it that. But then it's just a ton of talking, traveling, thinking, and more talking. The potential for expounding on Big Ideas is totally wasted. And secondly - and most importantly - the in-book pacing and logic of the characters was, frankly, dumb. We make first contact with aliens and the earth doesn't significantly change AT ALL? People take weeks and months to change their behaviors in any meaningful way? Bear proposes we would just ...carry on, barely acknowledging them on the grand scale? Throughout my entire reading session, I just kept thinking there might be a huge twist; neither Bear nor the reader could possibly be missing the forest for so big of a tree - right? But no, he misses the forest entirely. For all of his ideas and plot, Bear wrote a book about first contact where the protagonists carry on in an almost vacuum-like parallel world to the rest of humanity, only until THE direst of situations begins to finally unfold. Illogical and flat. Admittedly, there were a couple of pages in the last 20 or 30 that got me feeling something, but it was brief and passing and unsubstantial.
I wanted a Big Idea book, and I suppose in a literal sense, I got that. I don't regret spending the time; it was a fun little summertime jaunt. But I can't say I really enjoyed it all that much, nor do I expect to remember it after I try a Bigger Idea.
First and foremost, I love the really big idea sci-fi stories. I don't want super dense, super scientific 'hard' sci-fi. I want enjoyable reads that my brain turning. I want to see what decisions the author makes to unfold their own speculative approaches. And one thing I do like about Bear is his characters are pretty one-dimensional. At the scale of 'big idea' books, I'd rather not waste time on the minutiae of tiny humans when we could be talking about aliens, space travel, and cool technology. To an extent, Bear delivers on that in Forge, but on the whole, the book felt lacking in creativity. He conjured up a few concepts - competing alien narratives, the 'bullets' in the Earth, the spiders - but nothing all that special, even for having been written in 1987.
The biggest issue I have with Forge, though, was in the pacing - on two levels. First, of the book's ~460 pages, it doesn't actually pick up and get interesting until the last 60 or so. It does jump right in on page 8, I'll give it that. But then it's just a ton of talking, traveling, thinking, and more talking. The potential for expounding on Big Ideas is totally wasted. And secondly - and most importantly - the in-book pacing and logic of the characters was, frankly, dumb. We make first contact with aliens and the earth doesn't significantly change AT ALL? People take weeks and months to change their behaviors in any meaningful way? Bear proposes we would just ...carry on, barely acknowledging them on the grand scale? Throughout my entire reading session, I just kept thinking there might be a huge twist; neither Bear nor the reader could possibly be missing the forest for so big of a tree - right? But no, he misses the forest entirely. For all of his ideas and plot, Bear wrote a book about first contact where the protagonists carry on in an almost vacuum-like parallel world to the rest of humanity, only until THE direst of situations begins to finally unfold. Illogical and flat. Admittedly, there were a couple of pages in the last 20 or 30 that got me feeling something, but it was brief and passing and unsubstantial.
I wanted a Big Idea book, and I suppose in a literal sense, I got that. I don't regret spending the time; it was a fun little summertime jaunt. But I can't say I really enjoyed it all that much, nor do I expect to remember it after I try a Bigger Idea.