"All intelligences responsible for or associated with the manufacture of self-replicating and destructive devices will be destroyed." Started this, put it aside for a while, but couldn't get the premise out of my head so I’m glad to have finished it. This continues on from Bear's very enjoyable "The Forge Of God" ("Independence Day" with a brain) in unexpected and curious directions. We follow a group of volunteer twenty-somethings - merrily coupling without regard for convention - who are tasked with exacting vengeance on the murderers of Earth, a bunch of fiends who appear to be able to turn matter into anti-matter and cloak entire planets. Group dynamics are fragile, the current leader is flakey, the first drill is a disaster and their robot guardians are refusing to nanny them anymore. They find a likely looking system for destruction, start dropping bombs and then... well, that's all part one. What I like about this and "Forge" is that Bear does not screw around. There's no piddling about before Big Stuff happens, 100 pages in and you're reeling from the events and ideas in play. It sticks the landing too, although in my opinion this rag-tag group of avenging angels are very lucky their snake-like chums the “Brothers” find what they do in the eventual wreckage. There’s a delicious moral dubiousness hanging over all this and plenty of mystery as to who is being manipulated. True, nut-ball Rosa drove me up the wall and reams of xenobiology does nothing for me (a similar drawback I found in Stephen Baxter’s “Proxima”) but Bear is careful to leaven these aspects with other characters rolling their eyes and the like. There are a couple of magic wands being waved around - “noach” or “no-channel tranmissions” which enables uninterceptable, instantaneous communication within a certain range and “momerath” which is basically supermaths for all those pesky celestial mechanics that need working out but the science throughout all sounds disturbingly convincing. One suspects an audience with Mr Bear would be a dizzying experience. Very eager now to explore his other work which, by the blurbs, sound right up my street.
