City at the End of Time

Starred review from June 23, 2008
In his triumphant return to large-scale SF, Nebula and Hugo–winner Bear (Quantico
) links three young drifters in present-day Seattle with an unimaginably distant future. When the drifters answer an odd newspaper advertisement, they soon find themselves caught up in a war between mysterious and powerful forces. Two not-quite-humans, creations of a million-year experiment, have discovered that their ancient fortress/city, perhaps the last refuge of intelligence in a dying universe, is about to fall before the onslaught of chaos. They have been chosen by beings evolved far beyond mere matter to undertake a dangerous mission to preserve the universe's last vestiges of consciousness. Somehow the two groups engage in telepathic communication despite the eons that separate them. Something of an homage to William Hope Hodgson's classic The Night Land
, this complex, difficult and beautifully written tale will appeal to sophisticated readers who prefer thorny conundrums to fast-paced action.

July 15, 2008
Bear ("Darwin's Radio; Blood Music"), five-time winner of the prestigious Nebula Award, has written a dreamlike tale that interweaves cutting-edge cosmology theory, creation mythology reminiscent of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", and the Librarian and library of Jorge Luis Borges's classic short story "The Library of Babel." Spinning between the two spools of contemporary Seattlein the present universe aged ten billion years and the Kalpa, a reality that exists 100 trillion years ahead in a future universeBear develops the stories of four young people embedded in an epic 100 trillion years long as they interact with a malevolent godlike being and overwhelming chaos while connecting the present with the future and acting as channels for the rebirth of the universe. Plunging readers into a visceral experience of cosmological theory and the big creation stories of mythology, this challenging and imaginative work will receive critical attention. Recommended for public and academic libraries where intelligent speculative fiction circulates.Sara Rutter, Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa Lib., Honolulu

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2008
In a post-human future, one city, guarded by reality generators and surrounded by the terrible maelstrom of Chaos, is the sole bastion of order. In our time, three people who can alter the course of fate, a murky past, and the dreams of a decaying city at the end of time are brought together by a newspaper ad and into the hands of collectors of their kind. Back in the future, the strange characters include keepers and the Librarian, who seek to protect history, and others who welcome Chaos. As the lines of fate and possibility collapse toward inevitability, the three fateshifters resort to the tenuous protection of a Seattle warehouse full of books as a storm that threatens to destroy everything approaches. If the trio survives and holds onto memory through the disaster, memory will begin again, the long decay of reality will end, and mysteries will be solved in the eye of the storm. Fascinating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)