Hegira (novel)

Hegira is a 1979 science fiction novel by Greg Bear (ISBN 0759206848). It deals with themes including cyclic time, artificial intelligence, artificial life, and artificial structures of planetary scale.

Related Topics:
Science fiction - Greg Bear - Artificial intelligence - Artificial life

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In the novel, "young" humans (i.e. recreations of the medieval originals) are transported through the Big Collapse on Hegira, an artificial environment of the scale of Jupiter, which has habitats for several species on its surface, at the end of time to seed the next cycle of the universe. Those habitats are protected and uncoupled from the universe's entropy by means of forcefields projected by giant obelisks. In the human realm these are inscribed with the recorded history of humankind, sorted chronologically from the bottom up, including the science that went with it. People try to understand and copy what they can read on the obelisks, in some places they use balloons to get higher. Because the protagonist's beloved froze in stasis and a legnd tells that she'll wake up again if he'll quest to the rim walls of the habitat, he gets moving. On the way he lands on some island with a good view on an obelisk (1000 miles high at least) which is just tumbling down in the distance, revealing what is inscribed on the topmost parts of human history after its fall causes a tsunami and devastats a continent. At the end he succeeds on his quest to the rim and makes contact with an AI guardian of Hegira who tells him the story and gives some jolly advice to go and populate the new universe, because they became part of the last one.

Related Topics:
Big Collapse - Jupiter - Obelisk - Tsunami - AI

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