The novel “The Forge of God” by Greg Bear was published for the first time in 1987.

In 1996, Jupiter’s satellite Europa suddenly disappears. An alien starship is found in the Death Valley and an extraterrestrial creature brings very bad news for the future of the Earth. The discovery is kept secret by the U.S.A. government, instead the Australian one announces that they’ve been in contact with other aliens who claim they have come to help humanity on the road to unprecedented progress.

While world governments try to understand what’s really going on, other strange events bring further uncertainty. The growing impression is that there are more alien species but when even the President of the U.S.A. take a fatalistic attitude, the situation looks really bad.

Greg Bear had already written novels that were also catastrophic but with the “The Forge of God” he goes beyond with a story in which an alien threat that would cause the total destruction of the Earth is discovered. This is also a novel about a first contact with alien species and this greatly complicates the plot because humans meet different aliens who say very different things.

“The Forge of God” isn’t the classic catastrophic novel in which a threat to the Earth is discovered and the story follows the effort to save the planet. Instead, it starts with the announcement of a possible threat to the Earth and goes on in its first part with the attempt to figure out if it’s real. The plot is made very complicated by the fact that there are different alien factions at work, each with its own agenda.

In every new encounter with the various aliens, humans gather new information they have to try to check first proceeding at the same time with research to identify the actual existence of a threat to the Earth.

“The Forge of God” is somewhat of a jig-saw puzzle of which Greg Bear provides the various pieces in the course of the novel. However, only when readers have enough of them they start to form a precise idea of the image it will show in the end. The plot contains a series of twists that never seems to end and often discovering new pieces of the puzzle leads readers to wonder if the idea they had made of what’s happening is completely wrong.

The confusion of the readers reflects that of the characters, who are trying to understand the nature of the threat in the hope of saving the Earth. In “The Forge of God” people’s reactions are an important part of the story and that’s why there are a lot of characters, making the book even more complex. Inevitably, only some characters are well developed, others are used mostly to show the different possible reactions to contacts with aliens and a threat to the planet.

Among all those characters there’s science fiction writer Lawrence Van Cott, a homage to Larry Niven, whose real name is Laurence van Cott Niven.

The President of the U.S.A. represents the people who surrender to a religious fatalism and think that the Apocalypse of the Bible is coming. Plenty of people have such a reaction and not accidentally “The Forge of God” is divided into parts that have titles in Latin and are connected to religion, just like the novel’s title.

This remarkable complexity is both the strength and weakness of “The Forge of God”. That makes it a sophisticated and stimulating novel, on the other hand that makes it difficult to keep in mind all the plot elements and all the characters that appear and disappear in the course of the story. The pace is slow in the first half of the novel then accelerates because from about its half on there’s more and more action.

The research of the humans about the aliens is one of the basis of “The Forge of God”, however at the end of the novel we don’t know much about them and I understand that this may be a disappointing element for many readers. Greg Bear wrote a sequel in which a lot more information are given about the aliens.

Despite some flaws, I think that “The Forge of God” is overall a good novel but I especially recommend it to people who appreciate really complex stories.