Hey there, Readers! Welcome back to Nerd News Social’s monthly book Spotlight! Much like Jurassic Park back in May of last year, we’re revisiting a classic from back in the day! Eon is from the positively prehistoric year of 1985! Even back in those days it was considered kind of hard sci-fi. Big concepts, broad in scope and full of interesting ideas. But does it hold up after 40 years!?
…I’m so old.
Grab your reading apparatus of choice and join me, won’t you?
Book Stats
- Author: Greg Bear.
Formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook.
Price: $14.79 for Paperback, $25.04 for Hardcover, $9.50 for Kindle, and $26.21 for Audible, or one Credit on Audible.
Length: 480 pages, or 17 hours and 4 minutes in audio format.
Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki.
Number of books in the series: One of Three.
Basic Premise
The year is 2001. A bright light fills the sky and from it emerges a truly massive object; to America it’s the stone. In Russia, the potato, in China it’s called the whale. The truth of it is, that it’s a truly massive asteroid and it’s slotted itself into an irregular orbit around Earth and our moon. It’s also identical to Juno – a planetoid sized asteroid in our own solar system’s asteroid belt. (Juno is real! It’s a real asteroid we have pictures of.)
America and Russia are currently on the brink of all-out nuclear war. America’s more advanced space program managed to land astronauts on the stone first and has claimed it for America by 2005. They are hosting Russian and Chinese researchers as well, but in only limited capacity. See, the stone is identical to Juno in every way but one… it’s hollow inside and has been developed.
There are seven cylindrical chambers within the stone. Two of them contain massive, sprawling cities. One of them is filled with thriving forests, snow-capped mountains and deep lakes. One is filled with massive, unknowable machines. The seventh chamber is the real enigma, though. Much like the Tardis or a bag of holding, it’s much bigger on the inside than the out. In fact, it may be infinite.
There are other mysteries, too! Like the fact that the cities are human in construction, the plants and animals present on the stone are from earth, and that judging by the literature available the humans evacuated the cities some 1300 years ago. Also? If the history available is any real indication, Earth is about to go through a massive nuclear war called by these future texts the Death. (Cheerful, right?)
A set of problems like that require a truly skilled mind to help unravel them! Enter Patricia Vasquez. She’s a theoretical physicist and maybe the only one who can figure out, at the very least, how the 7th chamber can possibly be millions of kilometers long. Maybe longer than that. She leaves her family and fiancee to travel off-planet and tackle the problems on the stone. There are almost a thousand people living and working up there on this asteroid but her skills with theoretical space and time place her in a class of her own.
But is the stone from our Earth’s future? Or is it some parallel Earth’s creation? Is Patricia really destined to lose all her loved ones as California burns alive under a rain of atom bombs? Or does the very presence of the stone change her future enough that our world may be saved?
Meanwhile, the Russians are unsatisfied with limited access to the potato. They plan and execute a Soviet invasion of the asteroid. Pavel Mirsky is one of these invaders. He’s wanted to go to space since he was a child… though maybe not like this. As the Soviets invade, prior inhabitants of the asteroid start to make themselves known, but are they friend or foe? And how will humans from 1300 years in the future react to us primitive early 21st century models? More than any of that, will the Earth survive? Will Patricia uncover the secret of the 7th chamber? You need to read to find out!
My Take
This book was a huge deal for me back when I first read it in the early 90s. While everything and its mother has a multiverse element to it nowadays, this was one of the first times I’d really encountered the idea in any kind of detail. Between that and the technobabble that made it feel so grounded, I loved it.
Technobabble? Oh yes. So much it would make Star Trek the Next Generation blush. Polarize the phase inverters and reroute auxiliary power through the plasma conduits? Puh-lease. We’re dealing with 5th dimensional spacetime folds and a singularity contained in such a way as to power not only massive cities, but even propel small craft. Most of this is explained in pretty hefty detail, even if through the understanding of people who don’t one hundred percent get everything about why this stuff works.
It’s always interesting to see novels written in the past depicting what is now our recent history. In 1985 tensions between the US and Russia were high and that’s very much present here; in Eon’s 2005, the Cold War is still on. Greg Bear predicted tablet computers (Called slates in this book.) along with high density, portable memory drives much like our own USB thumb drives, though his were cube shaped. The abandoned cities of the stone have libraries connected to a network of all available information, accessible via computer very much like the modern internet. He writes of ten-key number pads that could be used to generate written words, very much like the way old cellphones would allow for text messaging. (Appropriate for 2005, honestly.) He even developed a language able to cross cultural divides with the use of small pictures…
Yep. Nice to know 1300 years from now Emojis will still be in use.
The things that make me a bit sad are the things that we were SUPPOSED to have by 2005 according to this book, but don’t. Colonies on the moon, for example. Or just a robust, exploratory space program with an eye for setting up colonies anywhere. This is probably due to continued high pressure relationships to Russia and China in the world of Eon. Competition driving innovation and all that.
The audiobook version is narrated by Stefan Rudnicki who’s voice is incredibly deep and smooth. He does a great job with differentiating everyone’s voices and accents, especially Russian accents.
All in all, if you’re looking for a bit of good old fashioned sci-fi; something to really sink your teeth into, you’ll love Eon.
Facebook Comments