This book started out great. It had a lot of suspense, a serious mystery, some compelling characters, and very high stakes. Greg Bear’s style is incredibly immersive, his descriptions are so vivid and his pacing makes it hard to put the book down. Just as as impressive is his consistency. Even across scenes so different from one another that you could be reading a whole different book, he was able to draw me in and keep me interested. Only, there was something about this book that worked against everything he had going in his favor. I’m not saying this a bad book by any means. It’s a well-built book that I just don’t like that much. Many of the characters didn’t have much of an arc, and all of them had a lack of agency, but I don’t think that was unintentional. ‘The Forge of God’ is, first and foremost, a disaster story, a sci-fi tragedy that takes all the hope and vigor you would expect from an alien invasion story and kinda just stomps all over it.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy reading the book, but after a while the conclusion was foregone. Once I realized what was going to happen about two thirds of the way in, I thought that Bear might defy my expectations somehow, or take the plot in a direction nobody would ever have seen coming. He achieved this a couple of times earlier in the novel, but once things really got going it played out exactly how it seemed it would. Again I can’t really criticize this because it felt so intentional, like the story was exactly what Bear wanted to say, and I have to appreciate that kind of intentionality when I always find myself wanting for it. The book just screamed at me the whole time that some things are inevitable, and some of those inevitable things are not happy. That was pretty much my entire takeaway, and almost every character’s arc too. Even in the very end, when there’s a little bit of hope returned, it feels too little, too late.

A few of the most intriguing questions established early on in the book are left largely unanswered by the end too. This was probably the weakest part of the book, but I’m still unable to really fault it here. Unlike in ‘Blood Music,’ where every last little thread was tied up in a neat bow, ‘The Forge of God’ has a more open ending to serve its sequel, ‘Anvil of Stars.’ This was obviously a well-planned move by Bear, but it leaves this first book feeling lacking rather than something I’d like to read more of. Given the bitter taste this first one left, I don’t feel much inspiration to read the next one, so I’m just left kinda high and dry when it comes to big questions like ‘who are these aliens?’ and ‘why is it they feel the need to consume planets exactly?’ I’d rather feel inspired to read the next book in a series than obligated to do so just to answer the questions the last book posed, and this certainly does not inspire me to read further.

All in all, I don’t really like this book, but it hurts to not like it because I can appreciate the craftsmanship. It’s like I ate a meal that looked great, tasted pretty good, and had high quality ingredients, but somehow just didn’t hit the spot, and now I want to go stuff myself with ice-cream to fill the hole.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley