Anvil of Stars (Forge of God) - Softcover

Bear, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1497636485 ISBN 13: 9781497636484

Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy, 2014

Synopsis

The “provocative and entertaining follow-up” to The Forge of God: Exiled from their planet, humans unite with one alien race in the fight against another (Publishers Weekly).

 The Ship of the Law travels the infinite enormity of space, carrying eighty-two young people: fighters, strategists, scientists—and children. After one alien culture destroyed their home, another offered the opportunity for revenge in the form of a starship built from fragments of the Earth’s corpse, a ship they now use to scour the universe in search of their enemy.
 
Working with sophisticated nonhuman technologies that need new thinking to comprehend them, they’re cut off forever from the people they left behind. Denied information, they live within a complex system that is both obedient and beyond their control. They’re frightened. And they’re waging war against entities whose technologies are unimaginably advanced and vast, and whose psychology is ultimately, unknowably alien.
 
In Anvil of Stars, the multimillion-selling, Nebula Award–winning author of Eon and other science fiction masterpieces “fashions an action-packed and often thrilling plot; by using each of the well-depicted alien races to mirror human behavior, he defines what it means to be Homo sapiens. . . . A gripping story” (Publishers Weekly).

About this title

About the Author:

Greg Bear, author of more than twenty-five books that have been translated into seventeen languages, has won science fiction’s highest honors and is considered the natural heir to Arthur C. Clarke. The recipient of two Hugos and four Nebulas for his fiction, he has been called “the best working writer of hard science fiction” by The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Many of his novels, such as Darwin’s Radio, are considered to be this generations’ classics. Bear is married to Astrid Anderson, daughter of science fiction great Poul Anderson, and they are the parents of two children, Erik and Alexandria. His recent thriller novel, Quantico, was published in 2007 and the sequel, Mariposa, followed in 2009. He has since published a new, epic science fiction novel, City at the End of Time and a generation starship novel, Hull Zero Three.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A book-length amplification of the last pages of The Forge of God (1987). After Earth's destruction by the planet-eating machines of the Killers, the Benefactors--another group of aliens--create the Ship of the Law crewed by Earth survivors (it's the Law that victims of the machines must pursue vengeance). Martin, a young boy in the previous volume, now near-adult, is the Pan (i.e., leader--the rest of the crew are Lost Boys and Wendys). We see them drilling endlessly for the future skirmish and arguing over whether the mothers (Benefactor robots who maintain the ship) have told them everything they need to know to do the Job. They find several star systems that seem to be the Killers' home; they attack one and are repelled by an anti-matter counterattack, escaping only by a high- tech hairsbreadth. Then they continue to a second system, and are joined in their effort by a fascinating alien race who are aggregate intelligences braided of individual snakelike animal- level parts. Internal strife among the humans makes more difficult their task of penetrating the overwhelming technological superiority and deceptiveness of the Killers; but they ultimately destroy the entire system via a combination of superweapons and aggressive brute force, leaving the moral tone highly ambiguous. Lacking both the real-world anchoring of its predecessor and the transcendent ending it promises (finding a new home planet--a third volume?), and telling far more than it shows. Despite some interesting ideas, then: slow and unrewarding. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1497636485
• ISBN 13: 9781497636484
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 492