The Book Stacks

Eon, by Greg Bear, is a book that I can only call Mind Boggling! (the capitals are deliberate) Eon is set in our near future, when Astronomers find an asteroid heading our way. If you don’t know, this is the stuff of nightmares for most people – anything over about a ten kilometre diameter would have a fair shot of wiping life from Earth and anything much bigger would certainly do the job.

But there are peculiarities about this one. As they observe it, the trajectory alters. There’s a cloud of some kind forms around it and eventually it settles into orbit around the Earth. Of course, as anyone would, humans decide to send some people up to have a look.

Greg Bear has written some excellent books, including Forge of God, Anvil of Stars and the unusual Songs of Earth and Power, and I looked forward to reading Eon. It doesn’t disappoint.

Eon is a bit of a slow starter in that it seems a little prosaic at first, more like a mainstream novel than what it turns into – riveting high-class Science Fiction. Greg Bear has penned a masterpiece work, taking his reader to limits of imagination and science they probably thought they’d never see, and he has done it well enough that some of the hardest science concepts are delivered in easily digested form.

The expeditions reach The Potato as it is known in Russia, or The Stone in the US, to find there is an entry at one end. They enter and find themselves in a vast cylindrical cavern, like an ice hockey puck, with a city plastered around the inside wall. As they investigate, they find strangeness multiplied, as well as an entry into another such cavern, then another until all in all they find six such hockey-puck caverns, each different and each less understandable than the first.

When they find out it was built by humans, the shocks are felt across the world, but these are nothing to the shocks that come in the seventh cavern!

Eon is a signature book I think, on by which many people will remember Greg Bear. He has stretched the limits of good Science Fiction and made an eminently readable book that will leave the reader sitting stunned for some time.

***If you would like to read my review of Eon to compare, you can find it here.

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