City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

Book Overview

In a time like the present, in a world that may or may not be our own, three young people-Ginny, Jack, and Daniel-dream of a decadent, doomed city of the distant future: the Kalpa. But more than dreams link these three: They are fate-shifters, born with the ability to skip across the surface of the fifth dimension, inhabiting alternate versions of themselves. And each guards an object whose origin and purpose are unknown: gnarled, stony artifacts...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345448405
• ISBN13: 9780345448408
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Del Rey Books
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

not typical Bear, but still outstanding!

Let me begin this by saying that this is *not* the typical hard sci-fi novel that Greg Bear is known for. So, if you are specifically looking for that, Bear has a whole host of other superb titles for you to choose from. (I suspect that most of the negative reviews resulted from that expectation.) That being said, "City at the End of Time" is still an amazing and intricate work in its own right, and one I would certainly recommend to any fan of Neil Gaiman or H. P. Lovecraft. It is a novel that defies typical genre expectations, because it weaves together far-flung science fiction with a dream-like fantasy-scape and elements of near-supernatural horror and mythology. Also the novel is, to a degree, a homage to William Hope Hodgson's novel "The Night Land"(1912), and, like Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", the noble cat plays an important role in the tale -- two things to note that I think some of the other reviewers either completely missed or failed to appreciate. Personally I thought the book was engaging and a excellent read -- I finished it over the course of two nights. I would certainly recommend that you give it a read and form your own opinion, but if you are a fan of any of the other authors I mentioned above you will probably enjoy the book as much as I did. Greg Bear remains a unique talent in his ability to write excellent works outside of what is perhaps considered 'typical' for him (hard sci-fi) and "City at the End of Time" is no exception. (For those who are interested, Bear also wrote the extraordinary fantasy novel "Songs of Earth and Power", which is one of the best pieces of fantasy literature I have ever encountered.)

amazing

An incredible journey, one of the most awesome books I have read in a long time. It draws one in to a rolling, dreaming atmosphere of concepts that defy description while allowing the reader to also marvel at the capability of the author's mind to hold this multiverse within it. It is somewhat reminicent of "Lost" with its own mythology and trips in and out of time, somewhat reminicent of Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind and its attempts to flesh out the metaphysical with words. I can appreciate that many readers will find this book unappealing - the style will either entrance the reader or it won't. For those able to become absorbed into these intertwined worlds, this book is a treat to be savored. Characters are endearingly quirky. Ideas set both the mind and the heart in motion. However, for those who recall Monty Python's "summarize Proust" sketch, well, this can be a similar sort of difficult-to-digest prose. I wholeheartedly loved this book. It stretched my brain, but not so much that it hurt - more like prickling. Like Blood Music, this book is a haunting trip into uncharted territory. Read it and decide for yourself.

The End of Everything?

City at the End of Time (2008) is a standalone SF novel. It is set in the present and at the end of time. And that end is much further than predicted. The city at the end of time exists more than a trillion years in the future. In this novel, Jeremy (Jack) Rohmer is a busker currently living in Seattle. He juggles mice and hammers on street corners and rides his bicycle throughout the city. He dreams of Kalpa, a city at the end of time. Virginia (Ginnie) Carol is eighteen years old. She is fleeing the people in a gray Mercedes. She also dreams of Kalpa. Daniel Patrick Iremonk is a scholar of physics. Like Jack and Ginnie, he is a fate shifter -- capable of wrenching his mind between timelines -- but he does not dream of Kalpa. Always before, he has arrived in a new timeline within another version of his own self, but this time he resides in the body of someone else. Conan Arthur Bidewell is a twelve hundred and fifty-three year old collector of written material. Lately he has been collecting books. Not popular books, but odd and erroneous editions of obscure manuscripts. He has been tracking the termination of time through the errors within the volumes. Max Glaucous is a Chancer, able to change the fall of cards and dice. He is also a collector of dreamers for the Chalk Princess. Today, he is stalking Chandler -- another collector -- and his partner, who are working within Max's territory. Max intends to dispose of his competitors. Jebrassy is a breed -- a protoplasmic entity -- living within Kalpa. His kind is relatively new, only a million years or so since their creation by the higher entities. Jebrassy is very curious and strongly aware of his own ignorance. Tiadba is a glow -- a breed female -- who is determined to become a marcher. She takes Jebrassy to meet her fellow marchers. When they meet the leader of the group, Jebrassy is surprised to recognize her as a sama from whom he has asked questions. In this story, Ginnie finds a place to stay in Seattle in a warehouse owned by Bidewell. The warehouse is stuffed with over three hundred thousand volumes. She does some of the physical labor of moving around the cartons and other such jobs. But Ginnie is also reading books selected by Bidewell to train her in his techniques. Ginnie spends most of her time in the warehouse, for she has already had one brush with Chandler and his partner and knows they were lately in the neighborhood. But she does take one trip to the Busker Jam, where she sees Jack for the first time. Jack has not had any brushes with the collectors. His biggest problem is getting people to remember him. If he didn't move around objects in the apartment, his room mate would advertise for a new roomer. Both Jebrassy and Tiadba are occasionally possessed by the dreamers. Jack and Ginnie take over part or all their minds while dreaming. Ginnie has learned more about Tiadba than has Jack about Jebrassy, probably because she sometimes sits behind

A simple idea, a challenging read

It took me a bit to warm up to this novel, as it does with any that switch point of view characters often. Also, similar to Jay Lake's "Trial of Flowers" I had a tough time trusting the author enough to become involved with the many unsympathetic characters. And yet, like the Jay Lake work, I was fascinated by them. Predatory, sometimes weak, they nonetheless all developed a (sometimes macabre) charm that made me care about what they would do next, and those characters surprised me at times. The descriptions were hazy, but I filled them in from my own imagination, sometimes based on my reading in physics. I was always delighted when something familiar, either in physics theory or from myth, presented itself. And therein lies the beauty of this work. I guess I've grown tired of having everything spelled out for me. I liked moving in realms that left enough to my imagination that I could be an active reader. It did have some repetitive elements that detracted from the overall experience, but looking at it from a structural standpoint I'm not sure that the repetition was avoidable. I would have liked to have seen more variety nonetheless. I think, like the characters, at some points Mr. Bear grew fatigued with the immensity of the universe and the contortions he put it through. Also, much as I like some of the heroes in this work, the importance placed on these elements/sets of things seemed a little too transparently aimed at me as a marketing tool rather than making actual sense. But I was willing to buy into it so that I could discover the true nature of the Chaos, Typhon, etc. or at least get enough hints to develop my own satisfying ideas about those things. Some of the grotesques and the dire nature of the approaching end of the universe made me wonder if there would be enough payoff to make it all worthwhile. For the first portion of the book I couldn't imagine a positive outcome that would also be satisfying. It turned out to be a strange end, quiet and almost as sparsely defined as much of the rest of the book, but it gave me huge freedom as far as my own imagination making a beast from the bones. Despite the fact that he didn't pull any of the typical and predictable tear-jerker tropes that make for emotional endings, I ended up on the edge of tears for reasons I don't want to state because they might be considered spoilers. But those reasons made the book for me. A simple idea developed into a challenging read. Definitely not for everyone, but absolutely the book for me.

AWESOME BOOK!!! But Not For Everyone

I just finished reading Greg Bear's "City At The End Of Time." It was a real page turner for me. I can understand why others would see him dipping into fantasy and all these things, but I just don't agree. Since no one really knows what happened BEFORE the universe came into being, any interpretation is as good as any other. This book is for people who love sci-fi, and like it stuffed full of theoretical physics. I didn't read a single thing which would fall outside of the realm of the theoretical possible (though extreme.) Carries the concept of observer based reality to its extreme (or observer dependent realty.) I personally believe this to be a dead end in theoretical nuclear and astrophysics, because the conclusions it forces us to draw are so absurd and do not mesh with the intuitive. However it is fascinating to read a book written with this type of physics at its very core. Thought experiments (the very creation of observer based physics), are a great tool for trying to understand astrophysics, but they are simple one of many tools. Just like mathematics is not a true representation of the world in reality, so too are thought experiments not a true representation of reality. They are merely echoes of the real, sometimes leading to new truths, sometimes misleading to absurd paths, like the many worlds theory, where every persons decision spins off a new universe ad infinitum. Sorry, just don't buy it. That is a basic premise of the book, one of temporal entropy. As you get deeper into the book, as time in the book moves forward so too the disentropic effects of time. Causality rum amok. That is where it becomes fantasy-like, but never leaves the grounds of todays current thinking about the far future and the heat death of the universe, when matter itself ceases to exist. It is of course a sci-fi writers wild extrapolation and interpretation of what that world might be like. Some further thoughts: Entangled matter, presumably once separated by vast distances now collapsed and as entanglement brought them together, they dance as if an aurora borealis in groups. Chaography - A newly minted word, which seems to mean different things to different people judging my google results seems to mean something totally different here. Chaos theory seems to be a purely baryonic playground, therefore one must presume that its a concatenation of chaos (not chaos theory), and topography, in other words, as time winds down and decays, as the end state of a cold universe approaches, Chaography, as Greg uses it in his book, I THINK means a general description of the chaotic state and effects of a dead, or near dead, universe. But thats speculation - others may have their own opinions. I personally believe (yes its a belief), that at some point during the end times decay, before, near, or at the point of absolute heat death, we will hit a 'phase transition', which will drop our entire universe into a lower energy density state, th