Book review: Eon

Eon is a fairly generic scifi potboiler from the Greg Bear stable which deals with Big Ideas in the vein of Blood Music or The Forge of God. I picked it up reluctantly, aware that I was going to dislike it at somepoint, yet I had nothing more immeadiately appealling, and in the end I did quite enjoy it. It is self-descriptive, which is either good or bad depending on how much time you have to fill.

Quick plot summary: an asteroid "moves into an eccentric near-Earth orbit" as Wiki and I think the book itself puts it. This is in itself a bit wacky; earlier, it has been spotted using some form of drive to slow its entry into the solar system, but somehow it parks itself using no obvious drive, thereby violating the laws of physics and no notice at all is taken of that in the book that I recall. Later on it does get given some weird physics-violating properties along the lines of "inertia damping" and other such excuses; but I rapidly lost touch with what it was trying to present as credible; it is one of those books that allows itself too many marvels.

After that we slowly get introduced to the various marvels, and we discover it is from an alternative universe, one that in the std.way is very close to our own timeline - so much so that our future may be predicted from its past - and yet different, so clearly we're all quietly ignoring chaos theory. Ah well. And then it turns out that the seventh chamber extends forever, because <waves hands>.

So it is all very thrilling, and the best bits are the new ideas and the wonder, but sadly these have to be linked together by somewhat tedious mechanistic workings out of, e.g., how the Russkie invasion would go; or what the politics of the future might look like; and whatever. A bit like having The Mote in Gods Eye and its tedious sequel merged into one book. The book has some people in it, because Our Author knows books have to have people in; and they act out their scripts faithfully, but are frightfully uninteresting, evn on the rare occasions when they have sex with each other. See-also this Goodreads review.

Oh, I should note a common dumb science trope: the idea that there is one big idea to be discovered by one brilliant unique person.