Background
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 ?", 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, where a big influence on City at the End of Time.
Read more about this topic: City At The End Of Time
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