The novel “Strength of Stones” by Greg Bear was published for the first time in 1981.
After a series of religious wars, in the XXII century the part of mankind most observant of the Abrahamic religions leaves the Earth and emigrate to the planet God-Does-Battle, where they built huge automated cities that watch over the citizens’s righteousness. However, the religious rules programmed into the cities are strict and they end up evicting humans considering them impure.
In the XXXV century, a man with a sexual dysfunction seeks a cure in a city but ends up discovering more than he bargained for about himself. An elderly woman gets pregnant and manages to gain some control over a city but must face a conqueror determined to raid it.
In the XXXVI century, a simulacrum of Robert Kahn, the architect who built the cities, is activated and must discover what went wrong and find a solution to prevent the humans who live with difficulty of God-Does-Battle from dying out.
“Strength of Stones” is divided into three “books” in which events are narrated about different characters over more than a century. A brief prologue tells how Jews, Christians and Muslims joined forces and emigrated to the planet God-Does-Battle centuries before. During the course of the novel other details are provided that explain the situation of the inhabitants of the planet.
The most religious groups belonging to the Abrahamic religions tried to create a sort of paradise on the planet God-Does-Battle building living cities which have a mind programmed to take care of their residents but also to watch over their righteousness.
The living cities were built to be havens for religious fundamentalism but humans are imperfect and everybody end up violating some religious precept. Therefore the cities judge their inhabitants unworthy and evict them and from there the decline starts.
Human beings, forced to live on a planet where climatic conditions aren’t very favorable, without the assistance of the cities are reduced to living in an almost primitive way. However, the cities start decaying too because without inhabitants they no longer have a purpose therefore they can’t fully work.
Over the centuries, small armies start attacking the weakened cities to try to plunder them. When they succed, they end up destroying them so there are less and less of them and the ones that still survive are in decline.
The stories told in “Strength of Stones” are initially disconnected and the novel suffers a bit for this reason and for a long time that elapses between the beginning and end. The last “book” however connects the various stories until it reaches an unexpected ending.
“Strength of Stones” contains interesting concepts but they deserved to be further developed. The way in which Jews, Christians and Muslims joined forces and moved from the Earth all together is dismissed in a few lines. The novel is more focused on individual characters, humans or otherwise, taken as representatives of all the inhabitants of the planet God-Does-Battle.
Greg Bear builds a world with living cities and groups of human beings trying to survive. This would be enough to write a trilogy of novels that develop the various elements in the tales told in “Strength of Stones”. When the novel was published, Bear was still in the early stage of his career so maybe it wasn’t possible for him to start such an ambitious project.
As it is, “Strength of Stones” is all in all a pretty good novel but I have to say that in the end it left me not very satisfied especially for its lack of depth. For this reason, I recommend it only to those who are interested in that kind of themes and Greg Bear’s fans.
