Hegira

The planet Hegira is enormous—far larger than Earth, yet possessing conveniently familiar gravity—and populated by hundreds of human tribes, nations and cultures scattered across a largely unexplored surface. Nobody knows exactly how they arrived there or why their world has been constructed on such an improbable scale. Fortunately, the landscape contains gigantic obelisks covered with the recorded history of humanity, although the most useful information is inscribed near the top. Civilisation has been provided with a complete reference library and then denied a sufficiently long ladder.

The higher a society can climb upon the obelisks, the more advanced the knowledge it can recover. Ancient history lies within easy reach near the base, while sophisticated science and clues to Hegira’s true nature remain hundreds or thousands of miles overhead. Technological progress therefore depends quite literally upon upward mobility, with balloons and other aerial devices becoming instruments of scholarship rather than merely expensive ways to frighten passengers.

Young Bar-Woten and his companions embark upon a journey across this extraordinary world, each pursuing personal answers among its cities, kingdoms and uncharted territories. Bar-Woten is searching for knowledge, but also for the possibility of restoring someone he loves, preserved beyond ordinary reach. His quest leads towards the distant boundary of the human realm and into questions that Hegira’s inhabitants have mostly converted into legend, religion or matters best left to other departments.

Their travels reveal societies built from fragments of humanity’s forgotten past. Each culture understands portions of the obelisks and has developed according to the knowledge available within its reach. The result is a planetary patchwork of familiar customs in unfamiliar combinations, demonstrating that if humanity were given its entire history again, it would immediately divide into groups and read different sections.

Over everything tower the obelisks: chronicles, machines and silent custodians whose scale suggests that whoever created Hegira possessed immense power and a regrettable fondness for monumental architecture. They record truths, errors, philosophies, scientific discoveries and the accumulated debris of human civilisation. Whether they were intended to educate, preserve or manipulate their inhabitants is another matter, particularly when the planet’s apparently permanent structures begin behaving less permanently than advertised.

Greg Bear combines the traditional quest narrative with planetary engineering, artificial intelligence and cosmological speculation. Beneath the exotic cities and wandering adventurers lies a mystery concerning Hegira itself: what sort of world it is, who built it and why its human inhabitants have been assembled there. The answers expand the novel from a journey across strange geography into a story operating on the scale of universes and time itself, because an ordinary lost colony would apparently have been insufficiently ambitious.

Hegira was Bear’s first published novel, originally appearing in 1979. This 1987 version was revised by the author, giving an early work another pass after he had become established as one of modern science fiction’s leading explorers of enormous ideas. It will appeal to readers of planetary romance, artificial worlds and stories in which the landscape gradually turns out to be a machine whose operating purpose nobody has thought to question.

This Victor Gollancz edition is in Fine condition. It has crossed nearly four decades with remarkably little wear and remains an attractive copy, although it contains no obelisk, map of the entire planet or practical instructions for surviving the end of the universe.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where all useful information is printed at normal reading height and customers are not expected to ascend a thousand-mile monument before reaching the final chapter.

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