Eon

Rating:
Summary: Confusing
Review: "Eon" may pose more of a challenge when it comes to selecting a rating than any other book I've ever read, since it consists of one half of a solid, well-written SF epic, and one half of a piece of incoherent junk. The story starts out like this: a gigantic asteroid arrives from outside the solar system and moves into an orbit around earth. The United States sends teams of scientists to explore it, and they soon find that the asteroid was a gigantic spaceship of sorts that appears to have come from our own future. Investigations into a library found on board soon reveal that the world is moving towards a massive nuclear showdown. This is the good portion of the book. It is written with intelligence, clarity, and an almost nostalgia-inducing dose of Cold War paranoia. The cast of characters is what most people have come to expect from hard science fiction: not extremely deep or dynamic, but believable nonetheless.

However, it all breaks down about halfway through the book. The story makes a wide turn involving alien invasion, parallel universes, alternate geometries, and some other stuff. The problem, simply put, is that this part of the book is too confusing. The explanations are cryptic and difficult to follow, and keeping track of all the new concepts that get introduced becomes quite a chore. Also, the characterizations collapse during the second half of the book. All of the major characters seem too ready to forget and ignore their previous lives and to accept all of the weird stuff that happens to them. One might, of course, make the argument that some enigmatic writing is acceptable and that "Eon" is a novel one that requires multiple readings, somewhat like William Gibson's "Neuromancer". The problem is that Bear doesn't have the literary style to pull such a stunt off, and I really have no desire to pour through this book time after time trying to fit the puzzle together. While I have great respect for some of Bear's other works, this one could have used some more planning and rewriting.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic ideas spoiled by awful writing
Review: EON, a 1985 novel by Greg Bear, is one of the science fiction writer's most fantastic displays of imaginative thinking and worldbuilding. However, I found the work rather disappointing due to Bear's poor writing skills.

The plot of EON is complicated, both in its science and in the political relationships between characters. Everything starts as a mysterious asteroid enters Earth orbit, and an expedition sent by the west discovers that it was built by humans of the future and somehow sent back in time unintentionally. Museums on the asteroid chronicle a future war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The most awe-inspiring facet of the book, however, is where the inhabitants of the asteroid disappeared to, leaving the cities there abandoned.

Bear's writing is atrocious. Dialogue is clunky and unrealistic, there are some really absurdly penned sex scenes, and his description of the characters is formulaic. The portrayal of the Russians is incredibly stereotypical, and Bear never misses a chance to beat the reader over the head with the message that communism was wrong and the U.S. right during the Cold War. With the non-English characters he makes numerous mistakes. Kiev (i.e. Kyiv) is called a Russian city (it's Ukrainian). The author writes a traditional ideogram to describe a Chinese character's shirt when the PRC has used simplified forms for fifty years. The Hellenic rulers of Egypt are confused with the indigenous Egyptians. Apparently, the author did little research outside of the hard sciences.

It is really a shame that the writing is so poor, because the concepts introduced here are fantastic. Alternate geometries, new forms of human society in the far-future, aliens some familiar and others inherently unknowable. The author's portrayal of a nuclear holocaust is harrowing but thought-provoking.

In short, I would not recommend Eon unless you are a heavy reader of science fiction and can look past the poor writing--unfortunately quite common in this genre--and enjoy Bear's imaginative ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Innovative and suspenful
Review: Good science fiction should be innovative in the future it describes and suspensful in the story telling. Eon is a great example of both of these characteristics.

Rating:
Summary: Alternate Universe - a different opinion
Review: I can't understand why so many people seem to dislike this book.
I think I read it in '91 when it came out, and a couple times since. One of my favorite books of all time, Eon never stops offering new surprises, new technologies, and big ideas.

Read the book. Make your own opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Unfilmable
Review: If anyone can make this book a film then maybe it is those Matrix guys but this would be a huge production if they did.

The book is about a comet with an inside that is bigger than the outside. There are cities inside that have been deserted.

This book is a great cut of classic sci-fi. You will love it.

Rating:
Summary: Some good ideas poorly presented
Review: Never having read Greg Bear before I wasn't sure what I had in store for me when I picked up Eon. A few chapters into the book I was about ready to give up on Mr. Bear. I could forgive his frequent forays into the technical discussions of hard science fiction. I could forgive his tendency to introduce subjects/objects/phrases and not properly explain them until several chapters later. But I could not forgive the hollow characters who behaved more and more eratically as the story progressed. And I disliked the teasing of what seemed to be potentially important subjects (i.e. the Frants or the increasingly promiscious nature of characters) that went no where.

Despite all this, he managed to weave an intriguing enough story that I struggled through these faults and finished the book. I certainly wouldn't put this on any Top X book list, but neither would I toss it in the trash if I received it as a gift.

Rating:
Summary: Some good ideas poorly presented
Review: Never having read Greg Bear before I wasn't sure what I had in store for me when I picked up Eon. A few chapters into the book I was about ready to give up on Mr. Bear. I could forgive his frequent forays into the technical discussions of hard science fiction. I could forgive his tendency to introduce subjects/objects/phrases and not properly explain them until several chapters later. But I could not forgive the hollow characters who behaved more and more eratically as the story progressed. And I disliked the teasing of what seemed to be potentially important subjects (i.e. the Frants or the increasingly promiscious nature of characters) that went no where.

Despite all this, he managed to weave an intriguing enough story that I struggled through these faults and finished the book. I certainly wouldn't put this on any Top X book list, but neither would I toss it in the trash if I received it as a gift.

Rating:
Summary: The Eon Enigma. Great SF or complete bollocks?
Review: Something inbetween perhaps. The ideas in Eon earn 9/10, however Bear's writing style gets a 4. For starters, he describes the different locations in overtechnical geometric language. Sentences like "Patricia stood parallel to the vortex so that she formed a toroid at 90 degrees to its summit" tells the average reader nothing. I made this sentence up but its not an overexageration. The book is full of these sort of descriptions. Great for a hard geometry test, terrible for anything but. In my opinion Larry Niven's geometric descriptions in Ringworld are about as far as a writer should go. Its a shame because if Bear had used simpler language I probably would have been amazed by the pictures my imagination formed. I think Bear's characterisation is ok. I disagree with other reviews in that I didn't find his characters akin to carboard. Neither does the book fall apart at the half way mark. The story develops nicely. The problem is that Bear spends too much time describing some things and not enough entertaining. I am not asking for a shorter book or for his characters to do a tap dance. I was simply hoping that Bear's characters would play more of a key role in the events that shape the 2nd half of the book rather than just being the unwitting cause of what unfolds. If you think about it, only Patricia actually does anyhing, and only right at the end. More involvement, less babble is required. It could have been a 5 star earner. This is the first book I have read by Bear and it is worth reading. I will check out Blood Music as I have heard its pretty good.

Rating:
Summary: Disjointed, confusing, but hardcore SciFi
Review: The absolutely blatent plagerizing of Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendevous With Rama" series aside, this book is a fairly healthy mix of harcore science fiction (heavy on the physics) and absolutely random tangents of plot that go nowhere.

I found the book unsatisfying in story development and resolution, but interesting enough in theoretical creativity to balance it out.

Rating:
Summary: Slow Reading... Very Descriptive Sci-fi world. Amazing
Review: This book is fantastic but its two other sequels are not worth reading. The story is about a very large mysterious asteroid that takes up an orbit around the earth. The only problem is that the inner dimensions do not match the outer dimensions. The story becomes a race between the Russians and the Americans to see who can get to the asteroid first to study the findings.

Eon is about another world, which exists inside this rock, but is also a portal to a dimension called THE WAY which is inhabited by millions and billions of different species. The WAY is also going through a dramatic change and it is up to the explorers to discover what the WAY truly is and why the asteroid has arrived to orbit the Earth. Lots of story and action but be careful because the actual descriptions of the places in this book require a lot of imagination. Great story, great plot, lots of action and a great character called Olmy.

My bet is that the Matrix filmmakers will try and give this book a bash sometime. It is said to be un-filmable but maybe they can pull it off. The production company is also called EON... hmmmm...