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.