Greg Bear's Eon (Gollancz, ISBN 978-0575082519, 464pp) is one of two 1985 novels – the other being the novelization of his Hugo and Nebula winning novellette Blood Music – that moved him from promising newcomer to bestselling hard SF author, and could be argued to be the primary link between the gargantuan disaster novels of the 1970s such as Lucifer's Hammer, and the Wide Screen Space Opera Revival of the 1990s.
Third World War
Eor was written in 1983-4, when Yuri Andropov was appointed as the leader of the Soviet Union, even though it was clear that his life expectancy could be measured in months rather years, when President Reagan was dubbing the Soviet Union 'The Evil Empire,' and new American missiles on British soil looked to many as if they might precipitate a third world war rather than prevent it.
Bear understandably extrpolated from these events, and his world is one where the world has already survived one comparatively small nuclear exchange in the 1990s known as the Little Death. Like the world between the World Wars, there is a feeling of business unfinished, and tensions remain high.
The Stone
Into this world of heightened tensions an asteroid dubbed The Stone is observed approaching Earth. Eon opens in December 2000, on the eve of the Third Millennium (like Clarke, Bear underestimated the media's incapacity for numerical accuracy, never dreaming that those with influence but contempt for accuracy might hi-jack the Third Millennium and move it up twelve months) as the realization dawns that like Arthur C. Clarke's Rama, the asteroid has been hollowed out and is, in fact a huge spaceship, hundreds of kilometres long.
Explorations quickly reveal that there are seven connected but separate chambers within The Stone. There are abandoned cities, micro-climates and sightings of ghostly apparitions dubbed boojums.
Back on Earth and on the Lunar bases maintained by both sides, tension continues to grow, and blocked off from unfettered access by the UN teams that they feel are American puppets, the Soviets launch a desperate attack to seize control of what all sides recognize as a priceless asset.
The Way
Meanwhile, back in The Stone exploration teams reach the seventh chamber. American Researcher Patricia Vasquez has already made one staggering discovery, that The Stone is from the future --or rather a possible future-- and that in that future she has written several ground-breaking papers explaining the nature of The Stone's travel through Time and Space. Even as the world is consumed in a tidal wave of nuclear fire, Patricia closes in on the possibility of returning to an alternate earth free of devastation, but is taken by visitors from the mysterious seventh chamber.
For the seventh and last chamber of Thistledown as its occupants call The Stone is the strangest of them all. "a region where all the rules fail." (p83) The chamber goes on forever, and running its length is a "half-metre-wide pipe made of quicksilver, stretching off to its own vanishing point, not in a straight line and not in a curve, not moving but not standing still." (p86)
This is The Way, a corridor that stretches off into infinity, and which Patricia, her companions and their Russian foes must all explore, if they are to have any chance of survival.
Poul AndersonGiven that Bear is Poul Anderson's son-in-law, it's hardly surprising that he should embrace big space adventure, but Eon comes close to eclipsing even Anderson's best. Bear's physics is at times almost incomprehensibly brain-stretching, but he never loses sight of the human elements, and in many ways Eon is his finest achievement, even when measured against later, more widely acclaimed novels.
Eon spawned two sequels, Eternity and Legacy, and a linked novella --inspired by William Hope Hodgson-- which appeared in Robert Silverberg's bestselling Far Horizons anthology, a compendium of stories set in bestselling SF universes. It's a worthy entry in the Gollancz Masterworks series.
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