Without wishing to go into details of the thrilling sci-fi wonders on offer I will just vaguely mention that nuclear holocaust, time travelling, parallel universes, posthumans and aliens all come into play. And Bear really should have stopped to find out what it is actually like being a mathematician, before basing this story around a brilliantly gifted mathematician, then he might have been able to do something a little more convincing than have her lie down and close her eyes when it was time for her to work her magic. The first part of their plan involves accelerating some tuberiding human habitats to near light-speed. It seemed that the end of this story was fixed about 100 pages before the end of novel, except for the minor twist that I found hard to care about - the main character dumped into a totally new and unresolved story arc.

Scientists quickly calculate that the asteroid is empty, and the US is first to land a team there to claim it for itself. Eon opens as a near future artifact, or big-dumb-object, tale largely inspired by Rendezvous With Rama. This nuclear war hasn’t happened yet, and the scientists studying the asteroid already realized that the Stone came from an alternate reality.In the last chamber, they find the opening to a tunnel that extends way beyond the size of the asteroid. It was a page turner, but only because I wanted to get through a long drawn out explanation of events unfolding exactly as had been previously predicted. The only time I was ever invested was when the rogue intelligence was meddling in the affairs of our human protagonists. Although these people can have almost anything they wish, nonetheless our heroine is miserable and lonely in this technological paradise.

She realizes that the asteroid is not from an alien civilization at all, but from Earth itself, 1,300 years in the future. If you enjoy the site please consider a small donation towards the cost of the upkeep and development of SFBook. The explorers find several hollow chambers, filled with cities and artifacts that suggest that they were built by humans. Not too grating to read, but enough to make me chafe, like rubbing your palm on very fine sandpaper. I will not go into depth about the story but what we all worried about in the seventies and eighties has come to pass, nuclear destruction on a huge scale.

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 should do. It has the exact same profile as Juno, but much less mass, because someone has hollowed it out into seven enormous chambers. It is later determined that the asteroid may have traveled from another time and may be a sort of homemade generation ship for a fleeing civilization. The description of the war is NATO’s most closely guarded secret, and politicians race to prevent a war in Patricia’s own universe.

Even when we were following events from the perspective of Russian soldiers, it felt like a low budget 80's action movie where every villain was villainous for the sake of being villainous. Greg Bear is the author of more than thirty books, spanning thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy, including Blood Music, Eon, The Forge of God, Darwin's Radio, City at the End of Time, and Hull Zero Three. And not only that, it includes a version of the Singularity, a vast space battle across a vast number of realities, a closer-to-home apocalypse, and massive geo-political rivalries right here on Earth. This article may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience.I am well aware that Eon has been written in the 1980s, before the end of the Cold War, and nuclear exchange between the two superpowers was still a possibility, albeit faint.