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Greg Bear
I've read this before in paperback quite a long time ago, This time in kindle format, I found it a bit disjointed, the viewpoint changes from one character to another without anything to give you a clue there's a transition.
This may be down to the kindle formatting rather than the author though! It's based on an intriguing notion that different religious groups remove themselves from the secular life that has overtaken most of humanity by buying their own planet.
Unfortunately the sentient cities they build to live in decide that humans don't live by their own religion's rules and evict them.
The story deals with some of the consequences, partly from the point of view of the humans and partly from the viewpoint of sentient city parts.
It's quite complex, sketching out how different communities might evolve stranded on a world that's very harsh outside the cities.
Towards the end a simulacrum of the city designer appears and you get the hint that there has been another plan being pursued beneath it all! Fascinating premise
I read this book about twenty years ago, and decided to reread it because I didnt remember it that well.
The book is mainly memorable for its setting,
The premise of the book is very intriguing, This is all on the first page, so its not a spoiler, In short, many/most of the worlds Jews, Christians, and Muslims join together in thest ornd century to purchase a new world for themselves.
They leave Earth and go to their new home, the awesomelynamed planet GodDoesBattle, There, an architect has designed living cities that will allow them to live in harmony with their faith,
Now things get mildly spoilery, but only a little, At some point, the cities AIs, programmed to maintain religious harmony, realize that all humans are sinners, So they kick everybody out, The story of the book begins about,years after this event, known as the Exiling,
My main frustration with the book is that what I have just described is about as far as the book goes with worldbuilding.
I do not expect an author to show us everything, but I did not come away with a clear idea of what the cities were actually like.
They are alive, meaning that they can grow, and they can die, They can move from one location to another by disassembling themselves, Humans are barred from entry by “silicate spines, ” Where I wasnt as clear was on what the cities actually looked like, Some parts of the descriptions made them sound like single enormous structures, with guarded entrances the cover art supports this view.
Other parts made them sound more like interconnected buildings surrounded by defensive perimeters,
The book offers even less detail on human society, except to address how the Exiling drove people to a despair that became a foundational part of civilization on GodDoesBattle.
The point of the book, though, is more the impact of the Exiling on the cities themselveswithout citizens, they must find a reason to exist.
Some just give up, while others do some interesting things,
I would say this is a good book for its ideas, and the ambition of its worldbuilding.
For fans of Greg Bear, “Strength of Stones” contains themes that will appear in later works“Eon” and “Forge of God” immediately come to mind.
There is definitely a common theme of ascendence through Greg Bear's works, but that aside, this was a beautiful, brutal world and story, and the best name of a planet I've seen so far, GodDoesBattle.
Don't be put off by the date it was written, It's still a mindblowing Greg Bear classic!!
Some of the characters are hard to understand, a bit difficult to figure out.
That is the typical difficulty with any Greg Bear book, He is a capable author, but when it comes to visualizing crazy futuristic IDEAS, he is absolutely extraordinary! Great concept, as far as these migrating self sustained cities go.
But the story and characters in this had very little personality, Everything that happened to every person seemed fundamentally inconsequential, And their reactions to things were flat, I didnt feel anything for any of these people because they barely reacted to anything,
I dont know what the chasers said in this entire book, No idea what they were talking about at any point, Their language is basically just really garbled english, For no apparent reason they devolved to speaking a shitty version of english, I dont understand how this would happen with a nomadic people who trade regularly with every town they pass.
Maybe Its a simple matter of me not understanding, I just didnt enjoy this, Thoughtful and deep. The reader sees the exploration of an abandoned world and empty cities and then he is drawn into a deftly woven world of biotech and sentience and wonderscience all knotted about the questions of mortality.
No other writer handled the religion aspects better than Bear in my view, And the end is both grand and sad at the same time, This triad of linked novellas by Greg Bear is another example of the wonderful strangeness that I think it the most important aspect of his work.
For someone who seems as a writer of hard SF I find that he is far more interested in the technological uncanny.
Hmmm not the best Bear book, I found the religious aspect confusing and upon reaching the end I was left feeling not quite sure what happened! The big problem with this book is there's no main central character.
The book is inparts,large chapters and after the first 'chapter'pages I got to know the main character only to find in the next part setyears later there's a new main character.
Then later the original character returns but the focus has changed, Most books are about one personnot so with this book! I was forewarned by the friend who recommended it to me that it was a strange book.
. . but I just had to read it anyways, I figured "Hey, at least it's short, so if it's awful, I won't have wasted too much time!"
Exactly as thestar rating.
. . it was ok. I felt like it had much more promise and failed to follow through on it, The concept is original and I was intrigued by it, but in practice it wasn't what I expected it to be, although I'm not really sure what I had expected from sentient cities.
Maybe something more like Anne McCafferey's sitelinkThe Ship Who Sang
The characters were by turns flat and intriguing.
The Chasers' dialect was extremely hard to read and I'm glad there wasn't a whole lot of Chaser dialogue in it, otherwise I would probably have given up on it.
I didn't quite "get" the ending either, . . I mean, I got that there was supposed to be some sort of light or hope at the end but it wasn't explained very well and to me, it felt rushed or like something had been left out.
I've never read any Greg Bear before so perhaps I need to try my hand at some of his other work and then return to this with a different perspective.
Maybe only for completists I do love Greg Bear, and especially his short stories, but I found this book to be somewhat unengaging.
This vision of future cities is quite compelling, and worth further study, but I feel it could have been put to better use if the author had told a single more personal story rather than covering the entire sweep of the cities' life cycle.
It's certainly an admirable attempt, and I found it worth reading in order to contemplate what could have been done differently.
This is actuallyshortish stories set upon a consistent world, with links between them, rather than a single novel.
The world of GodDoesBattle is an interesting one religious groups buy a planet, build AI governed mobile cities from advanced tech, but are then expelled from the cities for reasons expplained as part
of the narrative.
The events of the book center on the warring, competing remnants of the disparate religions, struggling to survive in a sort of postapocalypse some,years after the expulsion.
The hostile cities are starting to die and humans try to find a way in to recover tech, resources and a meaning to their lost histories.
Not the greatest scifi work I've read, but an interesting side trip into a novel world, Not bad at all. On a recent vacation with my wife, between the long flight and a few extra readings, I flew through this book.
It was the third or fourth time I've read it, and I enjoyed it as much as the first time maybe even more.
Although the book is flawed, I have always loved the idea behind this story, Despite the gaping holes in the narrative, the concept and characters are interesting enough for me to enjoy each repeated reading.
They were built to hold the hopes of Mankind, They exposed only his folly
In the deserts of GodDoesBattle the Cities stand alone, as beleaguered as the aspirations of Mankind.
Those still alive are silent, like in a dying universe they await dust and decay, Yet within the living plasm of their fragmented structures an ancient programme works still, implanted by the human creators they cast out a thousand years ago.
Before long, it is clear, the some of the Cities will fight extinction, And many of them will do battle in a quite unexpected way
Blurb fromVGSF paperback edition
Bears early work shows much of the promise he was later to show in more accomplished work, and certainly in some of the themes.
Religion is a thread which runs through much of Bears work either as a minor theme or right upfront as in Strength of Stones
The planet GodDoesBattle was set up as a world where fundamentalist members of various faiths could exist apart from the sinners of the rest of the galaxy.
Pearson, the founder, commissioned architect Robert Khan to design living cities in which the colonists could pursue their individual religious callings.
Khan, it appears, designed too well and the cities, sentient and programmed with the religious rules of their inhabitants, came to the conclusion that all their inhabitants were sinners and exiled them to the cruel surface of the world.
A thousand years or so later, the cities, which are capable of breaking themselves apart and moving, have become unstable are breaking down.
Chasers nomadic groups which follow the cities cannibalise what they can of weaker cities while they are in motion.
The novel comprises of three sections, set in three different time periods although Jeshua and Thinner, who are cyborg mimics created by the city Mandala to observe human society, appear in the opening and closing sections.
From a modern perspective it seems a little naive that fundamentalist Muslims and Jews would choose to share the same planet with each other, let alone the Baptists, Gnostics and whatever else.
However, it is a measure of Bears strength as a writer that he makes this rather farfetched notion seem perfectly plausible.
It would appear that two sections of the novel were published separately as short stories and certainly theversion has been revised.
It does, sadly, have the disjointed feel of a fixup, Solid tale. Not too bad. As a series of short stories, it worked okay, I did have some issues with the dated gender politics.
While heavy handed with its metaphors, I dont think it was clumsy with them either, Fantastical in all the right ways, with an awesome setting, Hints exist at an unimaginably broader universe beyond the land of GodDoesBattle, yet the story on this one planet maintains its gravitas.
Even if the universe keeps spinning, the lives of these people are just as important as anyone elses,
This was my first Greg Bear novel, and I will for sure be looking out for more, Tedious. This early Greg Bear novel is actually a fixup of three novellas, "Mandala" was published inand substantially modified here, "Resurrection" was published alone in, And "The Revenant" was first published only in thisnovel, Because of the cover blurb, I thought it might be an exploration of theocracy, but that is not much what it is about.
A thousand years ago, GodDoesBattle was settled by human exiles from Earth, following Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, who hired Robert Kahn to design selfmaintaining cities for them to inhabit.
His designs used highly advanced technology but somewhat misguided sociology, After only the first century of settlement, all humans were exiled from the cities, and they barely survived, The society which developed over the centuries leading up to the setting of the story treats the cities as mysterious and magical manifestations of the religions of their poorly remembered forebears.
Humans are sinners who have been banished from a real and visible heaven, In this world then, we have three stories of some people and machines who try to understand the nature of their reality.
I found the events of the plot to be somewhat random, never being sure what rational or magical actions the cities, partsofcities, simulacrums, and artificial mimics were capable of.
There are numerous references to actual religious names or artifacts but either I am not familiar enough with the mythology to see how they relate to one another, beyond a simple cultural devolution in the future setting or Bear was merely cherrypicking.
In the end, this is a message about advanced technology that has run in a different direction than was originally intended.
.
This may be down to the kindle formatting rather than the author though! It's based on an intriguing notion that different religious groups remove themselves from the secular life that has overtaken most of humanity by buying their own planet.
Unfortunately the sentient cities they build to live in decide that humans don't live by their own religion's rules and evict them.
The story deals with some of the consequences, partly from the point of view of the humans and partly from the viewpoint of sentient city parts.
It's quite complex, sketching out how different communities might evolve stranded on a world that's very harsh outside the cities.
Towards the end a simulacrum of the city designer appears and you get the hint that there has been another plan being pursued beneath it all! Fascinating premise
I read this book about twenty years ago, and decided to reread it because I didnt remember it that well.
The book is mainly memorable for its setting,
The premise of the book is very intriguing, This is all on the first page, so its not a spoiler, In short, many/most of the worlds Jews, Christians, and Muslims join together in thest ornd century to purchase a new world for themselves.
They leave Earth and go to their new home, the awesomelynamed planet GodDoesBattle, There, an architect has designed living cities that will allow them to live in harmony with their faith,
Now things get mildly spoilery, but only a little, At some point, the cities AIs, programmed to maintain religious harmony, realize that all humans are sinners, So they kick everybody out, The story of the book begins about,years after this event, known as the Exiling,
My main frustration with the book is that what I have just described is about as far as the book goes with worldbuilding.
I do not expect an author to show us everything, but I did not come away with a clear idea of what the cities were actually like.
They are alive, meaning that they can grow, and they can die, They can move from one location to another by disassembling themselves, Humans are barred from entry by “silicate spines, ” Where I wasnt as clear was on what the cities actually looked like, Some parts of the descriptions made them sound like single enormous structures, with guarded entrances the cover art supports this view.
Other parts made them sound more like interconnected buildings surrounded by defensive perimeters,
The book offers even less detail on human society, except to address how the Exiling drove people to a despair that became a foundational part of civilization on GodDoesBattle.
The point of the book, though, is more the impact of the Exiling on the cities themselveswithout citizens, they must find a reason to exist.
Some just give up, while others do some interesting things,
I would say this is a good book for its ideas, and the ambition of its worldbuilding.
For fans of Greg Bear, “Strength of Stones” contains themes that will appear in later works“Eon” and “Forge of God” immediately come to mind.
There is definitely a common theme of ascendence through Greg Bear's works, but that aside, this was a beautiful, brutal world and story, and the best name of a planet I've seen so far, GodDoesBattle.
In a theocratic world far into the future, cities control their own movements and organization, Constantly moving, growing and decaying, taking care of every need their inhabitants might think of, the cities have decided that humans are no longer a necessary part of their architecture, casting them out to wander in the wilderness and eke out a meager subsistence.
To the exiled humans, the cities represent a paradisiacal Eden, a reminder of all they cannot attain due to their sinful and unworthy natures.
But things are beginning to change, People are no longer willing to allow the cities to keep them out, choosing instead to force an entry and plunder at will.
The cities are starting to crumble and die because they have no purpose or reason to continue living without citizens.
One woman, called mad by some and wise by others, is the only human allowed to inhabit a city.
From her lonely and precarious position at the heart of one of the greatest cities ever, she must decide the fate of the relationship between human society and the ancient strongholds of knowledge, while making one last desperate attempt to save the living cities.
Don't be put off by the date it was written, It's still a mindblowing Greg Bear classic!!
Some of the characters are hard to understand, a bit difficult to figure out.
That is the typical difficulty with any Greg Bear book, He is a capable author, but when it comes to visualizing crazy futuristic IDEAS, he is absolutely extraordinary! Great concept, as far as these migrating self sustained cities go.
But the story and characters in this had very little personality, Everything that happened to every person seemed fundamentally inconsequential, And their reactions to things were flat, I didnt feel anything for any of these people because they barely reacted to anything,
I dont know what the chasers said in this entire book, No idea what they were talking about at any point, Their language is basically just really garbled english, For no apparent reason they devolved to speaking a shitty version of english, I dont understand how this would happen with a nomadic people who trade regularly with every town they pass.
Maybe Its a simple matter of me not understanding, I just didnt enjoy this, Thoughtful and deep. The reader sees the exploration of an abandoned world and empty cities and then he is drawn into a deftly woven world of biotech and sentience and wonderscience all knotted about the questions of mortality.
No other writer handled the religion aspects better than Bear in my view, And the end is both grand and sad at the same time, This triad of linked novellas by Greg Bear is another example of the wonderful strangeness that I think it the most important aspect of his work.
For someone who seems as a writer of hard SF I find that he is far more interested in the technological uncanny.
Hmmm not the best Bear book, I found the religious aspect confusing and upon reaching the end I was left feeling not quite sure what happened! The big problem with this book is there's no main central character.
The book is inparts,large chapters and after the first 'chapter'pages I got to know the main character only to find in the next part setyears later there's a new main character.
Then later the original character returns but the focus has changed, Most books are about one personnot so with this book! I was forewarned by the friend who recommended it to me that it was a strange book.
. . but I just had to read it anyways, I figured "Hey, at least it's short, so if it's awful, I won't have wasted too much time!"
Exactly as thestar rating.
. . it was ok. I felt like it had much more promise and failed to follow through on it, The concept is original and I was intrigued by it, but in practice it wasn't what I expected it to be, although I'm not really sure what I had expected from sentient cities.
Maybe something more like Anne McCafferey's sitelinkThe Ship Who Sang
The characters were by turns flat and intriguing.
The Chasers' dialect was extremely hard to read and I'm glad there wasn't a whole lot of Chaser dialogue in it, otherwise I would probably have given up on it.
I didn't quite "get" the ending either, . . I mean, I got that there was supposed to be some sort of light or hope at the end but it wasn't explained very well and to me, it felt rushed or like something had been left out.
I've never read any Greg Bear before so perhaps I need to try my hand at some of his other work and then return to this with a different perspective.
Maybe only for completists I do love Greg Bear, and especially his short stories, but I found this book to be somewhat unengaging.
This vision of future cities is quite compelling, and worth further study, but I feel it could have been put to better use if the author had told a single more personal story rather than covering the entire sweep of the cities' life cycle.
It's certainly an admirable attempt, and I found it worth reading in order to contemplate what could have been done differently.
This is actuallyshortish stories set upon a consistent world, with links between them, rather than a single novel.
The world of GodDoesBattle is an interesting one religious groups buy a planet, build AI governed mobile cities from advanced tech, but are then expelled from the cities for reasons expplained as part
of the narrative.
The events of the book center on the warring, competing remnants of the disparate religions, struggling to survive in a sort of postapocalypse some,years after the expulsion.
The hostile cities are starting to die and humans try to find a way in to recover tech, resources and a meaning to their lost histories.
Not the greatest scifi work I've read, but an interesting side trip into a novel world, Not bad at all. On a recent vacation with my wife, between the long flight and a few extra readings, I flew through this book.
It was the third or fourth time I've read it, and I enjoyed it as much as the first time maybe even more.
Although the book is flawed, I have always loved the idea behind this story, Despite the gaping holes in the narrative, the concept and characters are interesting enough for me to enjoy each repeated reading.
They were built to hold the hopes of Mankind, They exposed only his folly
In the deserts of GodDoesBattle the Cities stand alone, as beleaguered as the aspirations of Mankind.
Those still alive are silent, like in a dying universe they await dust and decay, Yet within the living plasm of their fragmented structures an ancient programme works still, implanted by the human creators they cast out a thousand years ago.
Before long, it is clear, the some of the Cities will fight extinction, And many of them will do battle in a quite unexpected way
Blurb fromVGSF paperback edition
Bears early work shows much of the promise he was later to show in more accomplished work, and certainly in some of the themes.
Religion is a thread which runs through much of Bears work either as a minor theme or right upfront as in Strength of Stones
The planet GodDoesBattle was set up as a world where fundamentalist members of various faiths could exist apart from the sinners of the rest of the galaxy.
Pearson, the founder, commissioned architect Robert Khan to design living cities in which the colonists could pursue their individual religious callings.
Khan, it appears, designed too well and the cities, sentient and programmed with the religious rules of their inhabitants, came to the conclusion that all their inhabitants were sinners and exiled them to the cruel surface of the world.
A thousand years or so later, the cities, which are capable of breaking themselves apart and moving, have become unstable are breaking down.
Chasers nomadic groups which follow the cities cannibalise what they can of weaker cities while they are in motion.
The novel comprises of three sections, set in three different time periods although Jeshua and Thinner, who are cyborg mimics created by the city Mandala to observe human society, appear in the opening and closing sections.
From a modern perspective it seems a little naive that fundamentalist Muslims and Jews would choose to share the same planet with each other, let alone the Baptists, Gnostics and whatever else.
However, it is a measure of Bears strength as a writer that he makes this rather farfetched notion seem perfectly plausible.
It would appear that two sections of the novel were published separately as short stories and certainly theversion has been revised.
It does, sadly, have the disjointed feel of a fixup, Solid tale. Not too bad. As a series of short stories, it worked okay, I did have some issues with the dated gender politics.
While heavy handed with its metaphors, I dont think it was clumsy with them either, Fantastical in all the right ways, with an awesome setting, Hints exist at an unimaginably broader universe beyond the land of GodDoesBattle, yet the story on this one planet maintains its gravitas.
Even if the universe keeps spinning, the lives of these people are just as important as anyone elses,
This was my first Greg Bear novel, and I will for sure be looking out for more, Tedious. This early Greg Bear novel is actually a fixup of three novellas, "Mandala" was published inand substantially modified here, "Resurrection" was published alone in, And "The Revenant" was first published only in thisnovel, Because of the cover blurb, I thought it might be an exploration of theocracy, but that is not much what it is about.
A thousand years ago, GodDoesBattle was settled by human exiles from Earth, following Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, who hired Robert Kahn to design selfmaintaining cities for them to inhabit.
His designs used highly advanced technology but somewhat misguided sociology, After only the first century of settlement, all humans were exiled from the cities, and they barely survived, The society which developed over the centuries leading up to the setting of the story treats the cities as mysterious and magical manifestations of the religions of their poorly remembered forebears.
Humans are sinners who have been banished from a real and visible heaven, In this world then, we have three stories of some people and machines who try to understand the nature of their reality.
I found the events of the plot to be somewhat random, never being sure what rational or magical actions the cities, partsofcities, simulacrums, and artificial mimics were capable of.
There are numerous references to actual religious names or artifacts but either I am not familiar enough with the mythology to see how they relate to one another, beyond a simple cultural devolution in the future setting or Bear was merely cherrypicking.
In the end, this is a message about advanced technology that has run in a different direction than was originally intended.
.