Anvil of Stars

By Greg Bear

This is the sequel to The Forge of God. The survivors of the destruction of the Earth have been set up on Mars by the Benefactors, the aliens who rescued a few thousand humans. Now the Benefactors ask for a crew of youngsters to travel through the universe looking for the home system of the beings who sent the planet wrecking machines out to destroy any young and defenseless civilization they may come across. When the crew finds this system they are to destroy it. They do find a system that seems to bear traces of the planet wreckers and they destroy it, but it turns out to be a deadly trap and they barely escape destruction themselves. They manage to get away and continue the search. In their travels they encounter another ship like theirs, sent out to perform the same deadly task. But the crew is dead, and have been so for many years. They again encounter another ship like theirs, but this time the crew is alive, having been damaged in the same trap the people escaped. So they join forces and continue the hunt together.
Some of the humans find their new partners difficult to deal with as they look rather like snakes. The aliens are composed of groups of these "snakes" all joined together and in times of stress the joining can fall apart into its individual "snakes" and these "snakes" are a lot less intelligent on their own than when they are joined.
The stress of the long voyage, the near fatal encounter with the booby-trapped system and then dealing with their new snaky allies takes the crew to the breaking point. As they finally approach the true home system of the planet wreckers, the crew becomes divided. Some say the planet wreckers are long gone and it would make no sense to punish their descendants. The alien allies are inclined to side with these pacifists. But others want to proceed with their mission and destroy the many planets in the system, sending to their deaths billions of intelligent beings.

I didn’t really care for this story. A lot of the book is just about their tedious voyage through the empty reaches of space. The crew dynamics were weird and I didn’t like how it kept referring to the crew as children, even though most were in their twenties after many years of traveling on their mission. The ending was disappointing. The best thing about the story were the snake people. They are interesting but it seems like the only reason they are included in the story is to look down on human deceit and violence. Mostly, it was pretty dull reading.

Review by Thomas Wagner on SF Reviews. net:   http://www.sfreviews.net/anvilofstars.html.