City at The End of Time - Analysis and Genre

Analysis and Genre

Science fiction critic John Clute said "City at the End of Time is an example of a novel in dialogue with past works of SF." He said that Bear pays homage to William Hope Hodgson's 1912 novel, The Night Land, with which City at the End of Time shares a number of plot elements. Both books include characters who dream of cities in the far future (the Kalpa, and the Last Redoubt in The Night Land) which are surrounded by encroaching chaos. The Kalpa also draws on Arthur C. Clarke's future city, Diaspar in his 1956 novel, The City and the Stars. Influences of other past works on City at the End of Time include H. P. Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Out of Time (1936), in which people exchange personalities in dreams across time, and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), in which the last of humanity in the deep future mentally contact people from the past. Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time was in turn also influenced by The Night Land, which Lovecraft is said to have thought highly of.

Bear admired Hodgson's imagination which, in The Night Land, had created the Last Redoubt as a "technological preserve" in the far future to keep out monsters that humanity had previously created, and which had evolved over long periods of time. But Bear's interpretation of The Night Land is that this future landscape is a "metaphysical place", and the monsters are "not creatures of this Earth". For Bear, this explanation broadens the novel's scope, and opens the door to other interpretations.

Another influence on City at the End of Time are the short stories, "The Universal Library" (1901) by Kurt Lasswitz and "The Library of Babel" (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges, which science fiction and mystery author Peter Heck believes is intentional. Books feature prominently in the novel in both present-day Seattle and the Kalpa in the future, and Heck sees it as "a metaphor that anyone whose life is built around books—whether as a writer, reader, or bookseller—can readily empathize with."

Clute notes that the Kalpa is not, as the title suggests, the last city; they believe they are, but the last city is Nataraja, "the city beyond the city at the end of time". Clute says that the Typhon is "a kind of god and a kind of quasi-animate principle of destruction" that is attempting to destroy the universe because it "cannot tolerate being told" or "observed". The creation and evolution of the universe is observed and recorded, and the Typhon will not tolerate this telling. In the Kalpa, Polybiblios creates Babel fragments ("Borgesian libraries that do not end") that, when brought together, will form a "backstory" that retells the history of the universe and overwhelms the Typhon.

City at the End of Time is rooted in hard science fiction, but includes several other genres. SFF World said the novel is similar to Stephen King's Dark Tower, where "an ultimate destination that defies both space and time are at the heart" of both stories. But whereas King focuses on "fantastical elements", Bear adopts a "scientific approach". SFF World described City at the End of Time as "an Epic Science Fiction novel elements of thriller and horror with some downright creepy characters." Kirkus Reviews called the book an "eschatological fantasy", and science fiction critic Paul Kincaid says the novel has "plotting and language seem to have been borrowed wholesale from fantasy". Bear himself said the novel could be fantasy or horror, but called it science fiction "stretched to the nth degree". City at the End of Time is generally referred to as a "Dying Earth" story, and is categorized under the Dying Earth subgenre.