It was never high on my priorities, either. Even less so now, short decades after leaving childhood’s shores. A children’s book that I hadn’t read when I was a child: what would be the point now? Of course, nothing has much point anyway, so when I stumbled across a well-worn paperback copy at my parents’ house a few months ago (uh, where did that come from?) I figured I may as well give it a go.

It wasn’t quite what I expected. More episodic than I thought it would be: the chapters are almost serialised, and I can imagine that they wouldn’t have been out of place spread over a weekly or monthly children’s magazine back in the day. It made it easy to put the book down for a day or so, and jump right back in and not feel you have to re-read anything to come back up to speed. Although, I must admit I found the sudden jump from page 102 to 137 a bit jarring. Did everyone else find that?

Hang on, I think something might be amiss here. Page 137 doesn’t usually follow straight on after page 102, does it? This isn’t one of those avant garde books that throws convention out the window, is it? It seemed so normal. Kenneth Grahame hasn’t perpetuated a giant practical joke down the century since he wrote this, somehow managing to brainwash everybody who read, adapted or studied this book into overlooking a rather large gap? Am I going to be swamped by some secret squad of book goons (don’t tell me they don’t exist…) and taken away never to be seen again just for letting this out in the ope–

Uh huh. So, um, I think something is amiss with this copy. And, yeah, looking at the really expensive binding method used (yes, sarcasm), I can see what might have happened: the pages just kinda fell out. Somewhere. Not here. Dang. I’m going to have to find another copy. Well, I could read the book on Project Gutenberg, but I’d rather hold a proper book and I don’t yet have one of those new-fangled Kindle or iPad wotsits for even a simulated experience. Nuts, reading on hiatus until replacement pages can be found. It is lucky the book is so episodic. Do I really want to buy a new book? Who gets the money now? It’s out of copyright, so I’m guessing the publisher? Plenty of options out there around the $15–25 mark. Meh, other options? I’d quite like a copy myself. Steal it? Nah, probably not the right thing to do. Ah ha! Second-hand. Yes. Pre-loved. Done and done. Back into it…

So, where was I? Episodic, yes. But more than that: it’s life. An adventure here. An adventure there. In between not much. Happiness here. Fear there. In between not much. Happily Grahame concentrates more on the adventure episodes than the not-adventure episodes, but we still get a feeling of progression, whether it be by the changing of the seasons, or the changing of the characters.

Ah, the characters. It is the characters that make this book. As it should be in a good story.

Mole, who sees the world with wide-eyes when he first wanders out of his house in the book’s opening pages. Who later, as his adventures progress through the chapters, becomes more comfortable with his new surrounds, the dangers they hold and at the same time becomes much more sure of himself. And in the end…well, you probably have to read for yourself. Clichéd? Only in the manner of a thousand other heroes.

Strong, competent Ratty, and aloof, intelligent, yet caring Badger and Toad. Toad. Mr Toad. What can we say of Toad? Immature. Fearless. Unthinking. Irresponsible. A gad. And someone we, on some level, want to be. Pure fun. And they are all imbued with character progression by Grahame — no mean feat.

Without these characters, The Wind in the Willows would not be The Wind in the Willows. Obvious, of course. The accoutrements of the English countryside provide a setting, but it could just as easily be anthropomorphised animals living in the middle of New York, or on the steppes of the Himalayas, or in deepest, darkest Africa. Yes, there is an innate English-ness about The Wind in the Willows, and the mannerisms are all English, but the characters, their characteristics, are universal.

Although the characters are not paint-by-numbers, there is a simplicity about the story Grahame tells. He doesn’t bother too much with keeping a consistency within his world: animals and humans interact when it’s funny, or even just when he feels like it, otherwise the two worlds are completely separate. For example, Mr Toad drives a car with humorous consequences, boards a barge and interacts with the human population on equal footing, getting arrested, being mistaken for a washer-woman. And yet the world of the animals is otherwise quite separate from the world of the humans. When the stoats and ferrets invade Toad Hall, the human police force isn’t called. Instead it’s left to Badger, Mole, Ratty and Toad to save the day.

Because of that simplicity, it is simply a fun tale with nicely rounded characters. There are the usual children’s tales morals of friendship and courage, which the one hundred-plus years between the writing and the reading haven’t really dulled. Read it and put that smile of childhood innocence back on your face.

This was not what I was expecting.

What I got instead was half science fiction, half fantasy, and all of it bordering on literature. Literature! From a science fiction writer? And one who normally specialises in the harder aspects of science fiction at that? Closer in spirit to Bear’s fantasy duology Songs of Earth and Power than any of his previous science fiction tomes, City at the End of Time is like nothing the author has written before.

Bear probably had specifics in mind when he wrote this book, and there will usually be one explanation that makes more sense than others, but this book has left a lot to the imagination. There are many things in City at the End of Time — characters, plot points, situations — that are open to interpretation. And therefore open to different meanings. And therefore subject to further study. See? Literature.

Speaking of imagination, Bear shows he still has buckets of it. Like many of his previous novels, the sheer scope of this book is something to behold. As Bear’s career has progressed, his stories have tended to get grander, and to get more apocalyptic. From the Little Death of his Eon series, to the destruction of the Earth in The Forge of God series, Bear ups the ante yet again, dealing with nothing less than the destruction of the entire universe in this book. And, not content to play with the universe in a purely Newtonian sense — the destruction of space at a fixed time — Bear gives a nod towards Einstein’s connection of time and space and intends to destroy both of them. In other words, not only does the universe die, but it becomes as if it never lived. How can some event that’s already happened become…um…not happened?

It is not only the concept that takes an extra level of comprehension. Bear’s method of writing is not going to win a whole legion of mainstream fans: the non-linear story-telling, the lack of explanation, the confusing, fantastical elements. I was not surprised to see that this book rates two and a half stars (out of five) on Amazon, with a fair number of one star reviews. I can see why, even if I don’t necessarily agree.

Bear splits the narrative between two times: present day (or as close as it makes no difference), which he calls ten zeroes, and the impossibly far future, which he calls fourteen zeroes. These names reference the age of the universe. The present day age is about 13–14 billion years old (or approximately a one followed by ten zeroes). The far future is therefore when the universe is about 100 trillion years old (a one followed by fourteen zeroes).

The world of ten zeroes is recognisable, but only up to a point. Superficially it is a grey Seattle, but a Seattle with a number of convergent and divergent world lines. These various world lines are the homes of the present day protagonists and antagonists. On the good side (possibly!) are Ginny, Jack and Daniel. All of them possess a special stone called a “sum-runner”. Daniel in fact possesses two.

Ginny and Jack dream of a city of the future: the “Kalpa” of 100 trillion years hence. They are also “fate-shifters”, capable of seeing their own immediate divergent world lines, and to some extent choosing which one they can take — a kind of cosmological undo button; a personal, temporal ctrl-Z.

Daniel’s gifts are similar, yet subtly different. He does not dream of the city, and his memory is often lacking on important pieces of his life, but he does have more ability to jump between parallel world lines. When he jumps he usually possesses (for want of a better word) the other version of himself in the alternate world line, although he has also found he is able to possess other people if required.

The present-day antagonists are an interesting bunch. The main one is an Englishman named Max Glaucous, who was plucked from an alternative 18th or 19th century London by a man named Whitlow to work for the ominous Chalk Princess, via her underling the Moth. Glaucous, like Daniel, has the ability to jump between world lines, which enables him to do the job the Chalk Princess chose him for: hunt down sum-runners. The presence of Ginny, Jack and Daniel in Seattle has called Glaucous, his hideous partner and other hunters (including Whitlow and the Moth).

Ostensibly helping the protagonists is the enigmatic Conan Arthur Bidewell. He provides sanctuary to firstly Ginny, and then Jack and Daniel. And then the self-titled Witches of Eastlake, the book group women: Ellen, Miriam and Azagutta. Bidewell’s sanctuary is a green warehouse in Seattle, within which he has stockpiled boxes and boxes of books. (Books, it turns out, form an important basis of Bear’s central conceit.)

Oh, and then there’s Bidewell’s cat. Don’t forget the cat.

The world of fourteen zeroes is completely unrecognisable. It is set in the Kalpa, possibly the last city anywhere. This universe outside the Kalpa is crumbling, slowly being overrun by a great and terrible chaos. The Kalpa, safe (for the moment) within its ring of reality generators, stands besieged.

Bear pulls upon his impressive world-building capabilities and fashions the world of the Kalpa so full of high technology and otherworldly culture that the terminology and descriptions border on the fantastical. Arthur C Clarke once famously said:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Bear seems to have taken this quote to heart. How do you represent technology and culture from so far in the future? It is going to be like nothing we have at the moment. Description of a short-term future — a few hundred, or even thousand, years — is possible using today’s language. Sure, it’s likely more miss than hit, but at least, if the author puts some thought into it, it is plausible. But to describe 100 trillion years in the future in today’s terms is going to seem banal, as if civilisation has had time immeasurable to advance, and we find it’s never progressed past our feeble imaginings. Such a time frame requires extreme exoticism.

So, Bear uses the tropes of fantasy and magic: invent words for things that seemingly have no connection to anything we know of or have today and present them as is, with no explanation. We have to accept them, as we don’t know, or perhaps even cannot know, the basis for them. Bear flings around unfamiliar words such as “Eidolons”, “angelins”, “bions”, “noötic matter” as though they are the most natural thing in the world. They are never really explained: sure, there are hints as to what they are, some are easier to work out than others, but readers just have to go with the flow, and that can make for a difficult read.

The Kalpa is the last remaining bastion of a universal human civilisation. Humanity has changed immensely: for a start most humans are now composed of the aforementioned noötic matter, which is “…hardly matter at all — more like a binding compact between space, fate and two out of seven aspects of time.” The notion of noötic matter seems to be taken from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Noösphere. The elite humans are known as Eidolons, which are apparently vast intellects stored in machines. The elite of the elite are known as Great Eidolons. Bear looks to have lifted the concept from the theosophical eidolon: an astral being, the shade of a human. Oh, and in case you didn’t know, a kalpa is a Hindu measurement of time. Bear has certainly been reading some very ontological subjects.

Within this city at the end of time it is assumed that the Great Eidolons wonder whether, out amongst the chaos, another city, Nataraja (yes, another Hindu allusion), has survived the chaos. For this purpose, breeds are made. Breeds are representations of ancient humans made not of noötic matter, but of primordial matter, the matter of which we are currently made. Breeds, suitably protected, can cross into the chaos (something which the Eidolons are incapable of doing) and search out the lost city. Two such breeds are Tiadba, a curious female, and Jebrassy, a would-be warrior. These two are connected via dreams to Ginny and Jack, and are the breeds that will make it further than all of the others in working out the mystery of the chaos, Nataraja, and the shifting story of Sangmer and Ishanaxade.

The story is classic apocalyptical, albeit told non-linearly: the world/universe will end unless our heroes can save the day (almost literally). The cause of the end of the universe, and the book’s ultimate antagonist, is “The Typhon”. As you may have gathered above, there are many allusions in this book, and I have probably not recognised a fifth of them, but one of the more obvious is Bear taking his overarching antagonist from Greek mythology. Bear’s Typhon is, for some part, far more powerful and terrifying than its Greek provenance. And it is most often presented matter-of-factly, an unstoppable and unknowable force of nature: the universe is tearing itself up for no good reason other than that is what it does. It is inevitable.

But, for the other part, Bear also presents the Typhon as a supernatural being, the real Typhon from mythology, something that can be negotiated with: “The City Princes made a deal with the Typhon”. Something that has a will, and is external to the universe — a vengeful god from another plane of existence. In fact, near the end of the book, Bear devotes an entire section to anthropomorphising the Typhon. I find this ultimately a little unsatisfying, pandering to my, and others’, need to have some explanation proffered. Personally, this was a choice I hope that I wouldn’t have made were I writing the story: to me the Typhon as an uncaring, unexplained, inevitability is much more frightening than a childish, capricious god.

Quite apart from the origins or intentions of the Typhon, Bear’s descriptions of the fates of those affected by it are horrifying. (And I think that Bear has substantial talents in horror: parts of his most overt horror novel, Psychlone, scared the bejesus out of me.) The Typhon tears at the reality of the universe, which, among other things, rends it into chunks of time and space. Everything so torn up also degrades into a grey, colourless, thoroughly distorted mirror of what it was. People, or any beings, caught in the rip, crashing into the Terminus (where everything ends), are consciously subjected to a degrading (in more ways than one) Sisyphean existence.

This book is a tour de force of science fiction, fantasy, mythology and philosophy. It is rich and infuriating. Bear is not afraid to leave strands untied, although he does finally draw together Ginny, Jack, Daniel, Glaucous, Tiadba, Jebrassy and others to offer a denouement. Personally, the ending didn’t satisfy me entirely. But that is how the entire book is: tantalising, with the feeling that a straightforward explanation is just around the corner. It is only as fulfilling as you want it to be. That is intriguing.

Some characters that you may think are important disappear out of the story without explanation. Most character’s motives are left unexplored. There are a number of parts where Bear stumbles with the story (or at least he seems to; there may be some underlying meta-reason that explains it; one I will probably never get), and despite the seeming urgency — after all, the universe is supposedly ending shortly (whatever that means when time itself ends for all time) — the story moves as if in treacle, if it could be said to move at all.

On a first read — and possibly second, third, fourth… — most things will not make sense. More questions are asked than answered. And yes, not everyone will like it. Some will be thoroughly put off by it, and give it one star on Amazon. A substantial number will not even bother to finish it. But some will love it. It can be thought about, dissected, critiqued as much as you want.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.