End of days: The Forge of God (1987) by Greg Bear

A genuinely harrowing and yet moving novel of an unstoppable assault on Earth by unknowable aliens.

Planet Earth has had some rough times in science fiction. Over the decades, writers have had it besieged, invaded, conquered, frozen, incinerated, and even stolen. Of course some stories have gone all the way and destroyed the Earth altogether. There are many ways to approach this narratively; in the British comics series Shakara, our world is glibly destroyed on the first page, followed shortly by the last surviving human. 

In The Forge of God (1987), the Earth’s demise is an inevitability. Greg Bear’s novel of apocalypse was published when he was establishing himself as a leader of American hard SF in the 1980s. This is a sophisticated, chillingly believable, and scientifically rigorous view of the end of the world. Crucially, Bear is as interested in human beings as he is in the devastation that unfolds. Knowing the outcome does not undermine the emotive power of his human-scale story.

While humankind makes a stab at self-preservation, this novel confronts the chilling idea of a broadly hostile universe for which Earth is woefully unprepared. In a way, though, The Forge of God is oddly uplifting - dealing as it does with the vanishing beauty of our world and that sturdy cliché, the strength of the human spirit.

Greg Bear (1951 - 2022) published his first SF story in 1967. “Destroyers” appeared in the short-lived magazine Famous Science Fiction (which as its name suggests, mostly concentrated on reprints). His first two novels, Hegira and Psychlone, were both published in 1979. Arguably, his breakthrough year was 1985 when he issued both the epic Eon and the shocking novel of apocalyptic transcendence, Blood Music. From this point on, Bear gradually shifted away from short fiction and increasingly focused on novels. 

Like Blood Music before it, The Forge of God is ultimately concerned with the end of the world - but it has a significantly different emphasis. In Blood Music, humankind brings a kind of destruction down on itself via an experiment by a rogue scientist working in a corporate lab in California. The Forge of God presents the ultimate external threat - an attack by an implacable, unknowable force from deep space. 

This assault is not brought on by any human action, nor can it be halted by one. This is a universe of cold, dog-eat-dog hostility, in which humanity appears to lack the biological or technological fitness to survive. Crucially, Bear prevents the story from wallowing in nihilism, but instead crafts something quite moving from human stories set against the gloomiest backdrop possible.

The 1987 UK hardcover (Gollancz), the 1989 German edition (Heyne), and the 2010 UK paperback (Gollancz). Amusingly, the German art is a tinted, vertically flipped version of the UK hardcover art by John Harris.

The novel opens with an inexplicable event which has no immediate effect on Earth but heralds dark things still to come. Without warning, Europa - the smallest of Jupiter’s Galilean moons - vanishes. One person perplexed by this is the scientist Arthur Gordon, who lives with his family near Oregon’s Rogue River. Shortly afterwards, a group of geologists investigating odd rock formations in California discover something even stranger. They happen upon a dying, insect-like alien who later says in quite clear English, “I’m sorry, but there is bad news.” Next, an alien ship is found in Australia, carrying robots who promise humans a new era of peace, prosperity, and brotherhood in the stars.

The sense that Bear creates through these early incidents is one of gradually mounting fear. Something is happening, but humans and their societies are poorly equipped to make sense of it. This not only ties into the novel’s theme of civilisational fitness and competition, but also recalls earlier novels like John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953). 

Arthur is drafted into a US government effort to try to understand the alien intrusions. This initiative is used by Bear to explore the human responses to and effects of the situation. The President is profoundly affected by an encounter with the dying insectoid alien, and frames his defeatist response to the crisis in apocalyptic, religious terms. Arthur is distracted by the news that his scientific colleague and lifelong friend has terminal cancer. This exposes another of Bear’s themes - the idea of loss, and how we process it at different scales. While Arthur becomes somewhat numb to the impending destruction of Earth, the prospect of losing his friend hurts him very deeply. 

As the alien threat escalates, Bear explores more perspectives. These include the crew of a scientific survey ship in the Pacific, and a young man who is conscripted by a separate, apparently benign alien intelligence into a scheme to preserve something of humanity. The Forge of God has some wonderfully moving moments, as these characters and others try to reckon with the enormity of what is happening. Bear weaves into the novel a rich examination of what love, family, connection, and our link with the natural world mean in the context of cataclysm.

For all the humane emphasis, this is a hard SF novel and Bear does not skimp on interesting scientific speculation. The specific methods used by the malign aliens are chillingly convincing, and evoke a sense of terrifying awe. The Forge of God also has a number of direct references to science fiction; characters discuss SF films they have seen, the alien attackers’ methods are compared with Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker stories, and Larry Niven makes a brief appearance (under the name Laurence Van Cott).

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (SFE) describes this novel as “darkly exhilarating”, which is apt. It also points out that its conclusions are quite different to the hard SF norm. The Forge of God sets out not to comfort, but to disturb. It deals not in platitudes or celebrations of human greatness, but in a very final end. It is Bear’s great achievement that he tempers its gloomy outcomes with some surprisingly uplifting observations about what people cling to, for as long as they can, when all is lost.

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• The concept of planet-destroying, self-replicating machines was popularised by Saberhagen’s Berserker series (1967 - 2005). More recently, it is at the core of Alastair Reynolds’ superb Revelation Space series.
• Bear followed The Forge of God with one sequel, Anvil of Stars (1992). Generally felt to be inferior to the original, it is described by the SFE as “softening” the conclusions of its predecessor. An expected third volume did not emerge.
  
• The first edition cover art was painted by Alan Gutierrez as a college assignment in 1982. The original painting is a far larger view, and depicts the Galileo probe visiting Jupiter.