Eon

If you like your space epics meaty - Greg Bear offers you possibly one of the meatiest epics of all. Eon takes a cast of heavyweight characters, a grand stage, and a complex space-time problem that'll make your nose bleed every other chapter.

The stage for the story is "The Stone", a large asteroid in Earth's orbit. The Stone is hollowed out and devised into a number of chambers, each chamber serving a specific purpose. A multi-national group of scientists and forces are responsible for researching the Stone, but the political set-up and secrecy around the project is responsible for serious political tensions that has repercussions throughout the story.

All this seems relatively pedestrian, until a discovery is made which transforms the story along a completely different line, bringing in elements of time travel, alternative universes, advanced beings and some heavyweight relativity.

It's brilliant.

It's stitched together amazingly well, throwing bucket loads of science-fiction at the reader whilst maintaining a cohesive narrative. The characters are well fleshed out, and there's some excellent development of those characters as the story progresses. It's a great effect, and makes for quite a pacey story, while still having real meat to it. The world-building is effective, from the Stone itself to the cities revealed later in the book.

Eon is the first book in "The Way" trilogy. I have only read this one, and it stands well enough alone, but there is plenty of material here which makes the idea of a full trilogy perfectly feasible.

Worth every page - but read while either awake or caffeinated. It is not dry, but it is most certainly heavy reading, in concept if not in verse.

This is science fiction in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke, indeed when an asteroid appears in a nova-like burst of radiation and sails neatly into an orbit round the Earth and Moon, one is instantly reminded of Rendez-vous with Rama, but this artifact is not alien. The Clarke tradition is to take an Idea then build a story round it; this can lead to novels that really don't have a good story or even much of a story at all, for example, Niven's Ringworld. With Eon, Bear does not suffer this problem; he tells a story that leads straight from extrapolation of the consequences of the Idea he had. It's a clever story and never boring but its one weakness is that it uses several major characters in order to cover all aspects and veiwpoints of the narrative. This splits one's sympathies so that the reader never fully invests in one character's interests - this leaves one too much outside the story, looking in.