Having read Blood Music, and now Eon, the impression I am getting of Greg Bear is that he has good ideas, sets them up well, but has no follow through and no idea how to end his stories. I really enjoyed the first half of Eon - mysteries and characters introduced and developed well, and some convincing and tense action and politics. I was convinced that Eon was going to be a really good read. Perhaps it was these early high hopes that caused my later disappointment.As the book progresses, things...

"Of course, " she said. "It's like touching the square root of space-time. Try to enter the singularity, and you translate yourself through a distance along some spatial coordinate." "You slide along," Farley said. "Right." I never tried touching the square root of space-time before so I cannot attest to whether it is in any way similar to trying to enter the singularity (which I have also never attempted for some reason). Still, as an avid sci-fi reader I like reading the odd bits of techno

Imagine an alternate history in which the cold war hadn't ended in 1989 and had instead continued to intensify. And to add fuel to the fire a mysterious object arrived in our solar system from who knows where that America gets to first and controls access to. If the Soviets believed the Americans were learning secrets that would give them an edge, tensions might escalate out of hand. But it isn't giving the Americans a technological edge, only offers confounding mysteries and a devestating visio...

I'm an admitted Greg Bear fan. I really liked Moving Mars and also Darwin's Radio and they are among my favorites by him to this day. Eon is one of those "asteroid hurtling toward Earth" books. There was a cluster of these types of books in the late 70's and throughout the 80's. Eon tells the story of one such asteroid, but this one has a twist. Apparently the inside of the asteroid is hollowed out and contains seven chambers wherein lie different "cities" or abandoned settlements. It is later d...

----------------------------------------------I've been amazed at the number of readers that have been so underwhelmed by Eon. This astounding book was published in 1984 and did not anticipate the end of the Cold War, only half a decade away. Some say, with self-righteousness nurtured by hindsight, that this is a major flaw in this book. But most sleepwalking Americans, at the time, had no clue of the Eurasian (and Eastern European) realities of the times. This is not Greg Bear’s fault. It was,

I loved this book as a teenager/young adult in the 80's. It was the awesomest thing I'd read to that point, and it remained awesome in my memory. I own a true first edition hardcover in fine condition—actually pretty rare, especially in such good shape—and it will remain one of the prized pieces of my book collection for a long time. Eon also will remain one of the seminal sci-fi works of the late-20th Century. In retrospect its influence on later works is clear, its position as a pioneering wor...

Review – ReduxThere should be a picture of Eon in the dictionary: right next to “Sense-of-wonder-SF”.Reading this book was like listening to a complicated symphony. Eon opens as a near future artifact, or big-dumb-object, tale largely inspired by Rendezvous With Rama. The novel then progresses through a number of movements, each more mind-numbing and awe-inspiring than the previous. It is therefore no great surprise that the book eventually evolves (or devolves, depending on your point of view)

ENGLISHClassic elements of the Sci-Fi with a reminiscence to the cold war Hard science fiction with a well-rising arc of suspense and many surprises.At the time of the writing of the novel, a continuation of the cold war in space was still a possible option.Time travel, parallel universes, megastructures in space and the continuation of aggressive territorial behavior in space are thematized.GERMANKlassische Elemente der Sci Fi mit einer Remineszenz an den kalten KriegHard Science Fiction mit ei...

Another book which I should have read 20 years ago, because now it feels outdated in regard to everyday technology. But the premise and worldbuilding are stunning - I love reading about alternate universes.The idea of an asteroid in space which turns out to be more than that is not new, but Greg Bear managed to turn it into a unique idea. The Way is a true wonder, and I loved the implications. I also loved the ending, which is not quite everyone expects.Overall, one of the best stories in its ge...

Here's a parody of all the male-written sci-fi I abandon:They looked upon a very important object: it had lines and was a colour. She reached out and touched a thing."Wow," said Russian Democratic Federal Leader of the Military Defence of the Milky Way Leader, Tessa Baryshnikov. "There's a hole on this end and the other.""That's right," said NATO-official Chinese Democracy of the International Order of Space Division Center, Third Division Demilitarised Antigravity Chief, Steve Jiaolong."So that...

Hmmmm...what to say about Eon? Ummmm...I finished it? Does that count? This was a selection for my local book club, as recommended by one of the members. The premise sounded interesting, and so I jumped right in. And...good lord...what a struggle. I'll admit that the first 1/4th of the book captivated me. The Stone was a cool mystery, and the science behind it was deep and engaging. But then the mysteries started being solved, and the book became less interesting. And as each new development hap...

There's a thing in science fiction called the Big Dumb Object which always provokes awe and a sense of wonder and all that, and Eon is all about one of those. They're called big dumb objects because boys of all ages love them, their eyes go all glazey thinking about the size, power and size of these things and all the author has to do is make sure their alien object is really really big. Works every time. Boys love size – breasts, penises, brothers, breakfasts, all good as long as they're big. S...

SF Masterworks 50: Welcome to a land of hard sci-fi. The first half of this book is pretty compelling in a Cold-War never ended reality, where the two sides are bickering over a planetary object, 'The Stone', that has come to orbit the Earth. What's more, many of the discoveries and determinations found on The Stone are truly mind staggering. The rest of the book deals with the resultant occurrences influenced by The Stone and what the researchers find.The suspense and mystery writing is pretty

I had... issues... with this book. The first part was, of course, getting past the Soviet-era antagonism and accepting it as what it was: a convenient antagonist at the time. I generally don't like books that have maps inside; like maybe if the author was better at conveying a complicated story, then we wouldn't need a map? This one DEFINITELY need a map. I spent the entire damn thing trying to just understand the world they were moving around in. Maybe that makes me stupid, but I don't know tha...

This was a book with a bit of confusing content in it. I pretty much liked its basic core idea. But was disappointed with things: too much of political stance to it, and too much of physical descriptions of technology and its workings. Having written in the late Cold-war period, this has its echoes to it, reverberating nearly throughout the story. But eventually I for one did not really like the amount of this idea that is focused upon in an SF book. The technologies by itself are very interesti...

There’s a sub-genre of sci-fi referred to as “Big Dumb Object” for stories about big, wondrous objects that defy explination or have some sort of air of mystery to them. Often inhuman in origin, investigating the BDO usually acts as the mcguffin that drives the plot. In Eon the Earth encounters one of these BDOs in the form of The Stone, a massive asteroid that parks itself in in Earth orbit during a rather politically tense period between the NATO and soviet governments. Oh yea, this was writte...

This is science fiction in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke, indeed when an asteroid appears in a nova-like burst of radiation and sails neatly into an orbit round the Earth and Moon, one is instantly reminded of Rendez-vous with Rama, but this artifact is not alien. The Clarke tradition is to take an Idea then build a story round it; this can lead to novels that really don't have a good story or even much of a story at all, for example, Niven's Ringworld. With Eon, Bear does not suffer this pr...

I need something from my reading. Be it good prose, or insight in the human condition, or wild ideas about science, or just a sense of escapist wonder. This book from Greg Bear doesn't deliver.Main turn off in Eon: characters that behave in a totally unbelievable manner. A global nuclear catastrophe is imminent, but let's not tell anybody aside from these 11 people with security clearance. Let's also put all our eggs in one basket, namely a 24-year old math genius. As time is not an issue, let's...

It's a book I loved when I was seventeen. On second reading, I question why I liked it. Oh, that's right, I was 17. Now I know.The plot of EON is complicated, both in its science and in the political relationships between characters. Everything starts as a mysterious asteroid enters Earth orbit, and an expedition sent by the west discovers that it was built by humans of the future and somehow sent back in time unintentionally. Museums on the asteroid chronicle a future war between the U.S. and t...

This is exactly what I was looking for when I was in the mood for some good 80's sci fi. Bear is a "hard" sci-fi writer - a lot of science, not so much in the way of character development. Actually, Bear's characters are developed fairly decently, but his best efforts come in his mind-expanding scientific/philosophical speculation. I honestly don't know enough math or physics to follow some of what he was talking about, but the basic ideas are pretty mind blowing, which is what good sci-fi shoul...