The Forge of God

Entertaining book, but not great. The plot is so unusual, a nice subversion of genre. Any other book like this and humanity would succeed in banning together and saving Earth, fighting off the aliens. Or at least understood what was going on. In this book though humanity is in the dark, and deliberately so thanks to psyops tactics from the aliens. We're left guessing to the very end whether the supposed savior aliens are even really good guys. The President is worse than useless, in the grip of religious mania. And to the extent humans ever do take useful action it's only under the direct mind control of the savior aliens, we do not save ourselves. The true free humans are off singing folk songs on top of a waterfall. Well one of them manages to nuke the spaceship in Furnace Creek, a sort of heroic action sequence, but it ends up literally not mattering. It's a remarkable thing to do in a sci-fi novel, to rob humanity of agency.

The weirdness of the story is my favorite thing about the book. I also liked the prose in the last chapter or two, Bear clearly had a fun time writing that tableau.

The book was a little smaller than it could be I think mostly because of the wooden characters. Arthur is well drawn and interesting but the rest of the characters seemed bland, honestly, and interchangeable. Also this book comes from the old era of White Dude sci-fi and while I won't criticize Bear for that, it does make the characters more dull. If some of the women characters were better written, particularly Francine and whats-her-name in Shoshone, it would have made for a better story.

This book would make an interesting movie. Assuming the adaptation stuck to the story and wasn't afraid of the subversive weirdness of the plot arc I mentioned above. Wikipedia says there were efforts at development ~15 years ago but maybe it didn't go anywhere?