Anvil of Stars, by Greg Bear

  
     

Read
On BART, between school and home and back again.

Bottom Line
Hard core sci-fi at its best.  Read it.

Full Review
The brilliance of good sci-fi, of course, is that despite a setting in a galaxy far, far away it manages to be completely and utterly relevant to the here and now, often in a way that most contemporary novels are not.  This one is no exception.  Anvil is in one sense an adventure story - the last citizens of a destroyed earth on a quest to hunt down their planet's killers.  In another sense it is a story about the threads that hold society together, the ways in which we relate to each other, and the ultimately fragility of all human institutions.

The children of the ship have been given a single mission: to enact the Law, which requires that all civilizations which make self aware, planet killing machines be destroyed.  Children, to anyone familiar with Orson Scott Card's Ender series, will conjure up images of ten year olds in space suits.  Bear's children are older, in their early twenties, but no less childlike and unaware than Card's.  This, then, presents one of the central tensions in the novel: whether these children, with such a small experience of actually living, will be the ones to decide the fate of another alien race.

I suspect that I have done this rather backwards in reading Anvil of Stars before Forge of God, which lays out the story of the destruction of the earth and the salvation of humankind by an advanced civilization known as the Benefactors.  On the other hand, there was nothing missing in Anvil, no references to the past work that obscured the text or dropped me from my journey thousands of light years from the earth back into my seat at the BART station.

A brief note on post modernism.  In most situations, I wholeheartedly agree with whomever coined the phrase "No mo' po' mo'."  Quite often, authors use this as a crutch, frantically borrowing ideas and threads and even whole scenes from others in an attempt to disguise their complete inability to spin a world on their own.  Not so in this case.  Bear takes the best of the post-modernist movement - the ability to take allusion and turn it into something else.  The children of the ship become "Wendys" and "Lost Boys", their leader is the "Pan" and the second in command is the "Christopher Robin."  These fragments represent the children's grasping at the now lost culture of earth much in the way the novelist grasps for fragments of meaning in this age of instant and universal culture.