Eon & Eternity

This book was written in 1985, before the cold war ended, and set in 2005, which is also now far in the past for me, reading it in 2019. So, requires a bit of recontextualization. I suspect I'd have been much more impressed with this book if I'd read it in 1985, but now the characterizations of the Russians seems so very stereotypical and shallow, it's hard to judge it entirely fairly as a product of the time it was written.

It's got a lot of interesting theoretical physics in it - apparently the author is a physicist - but I think a bit more than the plot actually needs. I mean, I do enjoy science fiction that is actually plausible, but there's a line past which more details are actually unnecessary to the plot and make it harder to get into the story, and I felt as if this book passed that line. In fact, it seemed at times as if the author wasn't sure himself whether the plot was ABOUT the physics, or about the characters, and I think if he'd picked just one or the other and focused on it, the book would probably have been more captivating.

The setting is grand and breathtaking on the scale of Arthur C Clarke's mysterious objects on the moon or similar - enormous mysterious asteroid appears in orbit around Earth in 2005, and turns out to be from an alternate version of Earth's future history. Scientists explore mysterious object, discover it is bigger inside than outside, and full of fascinating future technologies. Some of the characters are somewhat interesting, and I did like that the smartest person in the book was a woman, which was fairly rare in 1985. The character dialog and development are pretty stilted though, the science is Bear's stronger area than characters. The sex scenes are pretty odd too - guy on mission feels inexplicably horny, subordinate female character offers sex to ensure maximum efficiency, all part of business? I kind of understand what the author was getting at but it wasn't conveyed very well and seemed totally irrelevant to the plot, so would probably have been better just to leave out the sex scenes entirely.

An interesting speculative book and product of its time, but perhaps harder to appreciate nowadays because both the world and the style of science fiction writing have changed so much since it was written.

Eon is a pretty good story overall. The first half of it suffers from outdated political motifs such as the threat and eventuality of mutually assured nuclear destruction between the U.S., Russia and China, resulting in a nuclear winter called "the Death." Some of the sections that dwell on these obsolete political posturings are humorous, but many are merely tiresome.

The story hits its stride when it sticks to the science fiction and leaves the political intrigue behind. The incredibly cool technology of the chambers within the Stone and the synthetic universe of the Way are what kept me coming back to the story. It seems like these sections were fewer and shorter than the others, but it may just be that I read through them faster.

Of course, if there is a moral to the story, it's wariness. One finds out that all of the new technology is, just like the nuclear warheads that caused the Death, nothing more than a political tool to be manipulated by the descendants of humanity. It's not necessarily an overt message, but it's not a hidden one either -- I give Greg Bear credit at least for not making more or less out of it than it should be.

And I'm still laughing about the concept of Naderites.