The Forge of God, by Greg Bear

I've come to like Greg Bear first through his contribution to Asimov's New Foundation Trilogy and later through his awesome "Darwin's Radio". Having read these two and aching for some good sci-fi, I picked this title up at my local library. All is all, it is not a bad read, but it didn't get me terribly excited. It reads well, it's fairly light (it tastes of soft sci-fi) and is entertaining, but a great read it is not. It's one of those gloom and doom stories about alien invasion and I won't say more lest I spoil it for you. Suffice it to say it was a good summer read, but nothing to enter the annals of the genre. I was outraged with a sentence about a child and a dog at the end of the book (I thought it was the corniest thing with which to end a book).