The Forge of God by Greg Bear is a bit of an old book to be reviewing now. It was first published in 1987 and it’s 2025 now. Did I pick it up without realizing this? Was a stricken with an acute case of nostalgia? Was I trapped in an abandoned house with nothing else to read? Dear reader, I assure you that nothing so exciting happened. I simply saw it on my shelf and decided to read it. I don’t need any other reason that that.

As an aside, this is one of the values of having a shelf of books. I was at home one evening, I wanted something to read, and there it was. I didn’t have to go find something to download onto my Kindle. I didn’t have to even boot up my phone. I had an honest-to-god paper-bound book right there to choose from. I will always keep good books around for just such an occasion.

I probably first read the book about 20 years ago. That may or may not have been when I picked up this copy. I had a short Greg Bear kick where I read a many of his novels. It had been long enough that I had completely forgotten the plot. In fact, I picked this up thinking it was going to be a different novel (Eon) and it took me a few dozen pages to realize that I was reading something I had little to no recollection of. What’s better than reading a good book? Getting to read it twice!

Many Sci-Fi novels like to take an established world or trope and tweak it just a bit. What if we had an epic battle of good and evil, but in space? You’d get Star Wars. What if you lived forever and could travel around anywhere in time and space? Doctor Who. What if we could clone animals from fossilized DNA? Jurassic Park. It’s a fun little thought experiment to think how things would be if something were familiar but a bit different.

That’s not what Greg Bear does at all. What I love about his novels is that they take a premise and follow it out beyond the logical conclusion. It leads you somewhere uncomfortable and alien. But that’s exactly what the universe is. It’s easy to imagine something familiar. It’s a challenge to the writer and reader to imagine something unfamiliar.

The Forge of God addresses the usual trope of first contact with aliens. This has been rehashed so many times. I recently watched Arrival and it’s a pretty predictable plot where the aliens arrive, there’s a struggle to communicate, then the aliens impart a gift and leave and we are left with the impression that humanity is young but has much potential. The Forge of God asks, “what if the aliens were going to destroy the planet and there was nothing we could do about it?”

It’s a frightening prospect, but it’s real. Rogue asteroids, climate change, solar flares, the reality is that we have very little control over the world around us. There as many forces that are bigger and more powerful than anything that we can deal with. And that’s even if we could all band together as a planet to defend ourselves, which seems unlikely given the state of world politics.

The book has an ensemble cast that has to confront their own powerlessness in the large and must embrace their power in the small. It is ultimately an uplifting tale about how humans can continue to find their own meaning, purpose and agency even in the face of so many things out of our control. And that’s really an honest message.

Many stories want you to feel good in the end about how we’d all band together and win and everything will be okay. Life isn’t like that. We are each one person moving through a vast, powerful, dangerous and wondrous world. There will be many things that we have to accept and it’s up to us to figure out how we live, hope and dream within that framework.

That’s what I see as the main theme of this book. It’s one that exists in a lot of Greg Bear’s work and I think it’s what makes him such a compelling author.

And just as a note, the book mostly holds up after almost four decades. Sure, we have a lot more computing power now, but all the characters are still believable and relatable.