page_title: City at the End of Time
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: City at the End of Time / Background
caption_attribution_description: Photo of science fiction writer Greg Bear taken at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow (photo by Geoffrey A. Landis, August 2005)
context_page_description: City at the End of Time is a 2008 science fiction novel by American writer Greg Bear. It was published in August 2008 by Del Rey in the United States, and Gollancz in the United Kingdom. The story follows three drifters in present-day Seattle who are tormented by strange dreams of the Kalpa, a city one hundred trillion years in the future. The Kalpa is attempting to ward off the Typhon, an inexplicable entity that has consumed the rest of the ancient universe and broken down the laws of physics.
  The novel belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. It is rooted in hard science fiction, but also incorporates several other genres, including fantasy and horror. Bear called it science fiction "stretched to the nth degree". He said that in the novel he honors those writers who changed the face of science fiction and fantasy, including William Hope Hodgson and Arthur C. Clarke, and pays homage to Hodgson's 1912 novel, The Night Land, with which City at the End of Time shares a number of plot elements.
  The novel received a mixed reception from critics.
context_section_description: Greg Bear is an award-winning science fiction writer from Seattle. He has won three Nebula Awards, including the 1995 Award for Best Novel for Moving Mars, and two Hugo Awards, including the 1983 Award for Best Novelette for Blood Music. City at the End of Time was his first novel since Quantico, which was first published in 2005. Bear's early influences included science fiction authors Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson.
  Bear called City at the End of Time his "longest and most ambitious science fiction novel" he has written for a while. He said it is a "significant departure" from any of his previous works, and that it has a future history unlike anything he had tackled before. In an interview with Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine in September 2008, Bear said that what inspired him to write City at the End of Time was the question, "What if we're still primitive in our thinking [about physics and cosmology]?", and this led to the idea for a story of "a Universe that goes on and on and on, and how reality might have to be changed by that circumstance."
  Bear told Locus magazine in August 2008 that he had found what appears to be a "continuity" in British science fiction: H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956), and Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (1908) and  The Night Land (1912), all speculate on the evolution of humankind in the deep future. Bear said that these works, and their author's imagination, were a big influence on City at the End of Time.
caption: Greg Bear, 2005
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