Eon: 1

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Maybe if you liked Banks’ The Algebraist or Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn you’ll like this – similarly bloated balderdash disguised as serious science fiction. It has the exact same profile as Juno, but much less mass, because someone has hollowed it out into seven enormous chambers.

They all have their own goals, and the Stone’s reappearance in Earth’s orbit upended many of their plans for the future. On the other hand, more time could have been allowed to develop the many characters and their own story lines, the esoteric concepts more carefully explored if it was spread out over several books. In both cases, we have two groups that are not necessarily enemies but have very different ideas of how to achieve their goals.

It is really a shame that the writing is so poor, because the concepts introduced here are fantastic. I use that trick to post stuff I don’t want to appear in the reader, like the two index posts I did some time ago. I came up a bit short there, as there really isn't much of a plot, at least, not in the first 400 pages.

Upon exploration, we discover that the asteroid is hollow, has artificial gravity and is divided up into seven huge chambers, some of which contain cities. So in Eon you get a big asteroid thing hanging up there in the sky which when they go and investigate they find it's bigger inside than it is outside. surface, they find that the asteroid is actually hollow, it's a huge spaceship abandoned by a superior technological race. That said, this was a visionary, ambitious work of SF that was crammed full of ideas which is precisely what SF should be doing.But eventually I for one did not really like the amount of this idea that is focused upon in an SF book. It's easy to point a finger at Clarke's Rama or high-level topography math/physics or any number of alternate universe novels or time-travel tomes, but it's something else entirely to pull all of these rabbits out of a single hat. First encountered Bear in reading the Mongoliad series which is co-authors with Stephenson and others, and liked it. To make matters more confusing, some of the politicians kept switching allegiances or revealing their true motives even before I got to understand their original pretense, and thus fully appreciate the switch they pulled. If the Soviets believed the Americans were learning secrets that would give them an edge, tensions might escalate out of hand.

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. The bottom line: Not a lesson in style, a little dated, flattish characters, a Rama-rip but with more moving parts, and a flounder. 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).In fact, one can intelligently argue that mankind is still very, very close to destroying itself in a number of frighteningly different ways. It moves into an eccentric near-Earth orbit where the rival polities of Earth each try to claim this mysterious object. I didn't care too much for any given character but that often doesn't bother me as I'm more interested in the worldbuilding (tech, history etc). The flounder: I mostly liked this story minus the Gorbachev factor, but at some point after the Way, it floundered.