2006 books

[peteryoung]

29) Greg Bear, Eon, 1985
An asteroid parked into Earth orbit turns out to be the man-made entry point to both interstellar travel and alternate universes. Eon too often feels like old-school fantasy dressed up as hard SF, and with more recent and slicker descendants such as Al Reynolds's Pushing Ice to contend with I found Eon very much of its time and rather sleep-inducing in parts, mostly down to the pace: it takes a long time to get going and when it picks up any pace at all it never really gets beyond third gear. Nevertheless the unexpected ending does make me want to read the shorter sequel, Eternity.

Comments

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

Whatever you do, don't read Eternity. Life is too short.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I was half-hoping someone was going to warn me off it.

I'm sure I have Dumas's The Lover somewhere. Sounds similar to Alessandro Baricco's Silk, which is also good.

Greg Bear

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

If you didn't like Eon you certainly won't like Eternity. I quite liked Eon but I loathed Eternity. It has all the faults of Eon without any of the virtues.

On the other hand I quite like Greg Bear's fantasy novel Songs of Earth and Power. And his short story Petra is excellent.

[ajr.livejournal.com]

I really liked Eon when I read it (about ten years ago now, perhaps longer), though the 'not really an ending' ending did annoy me a bit, but I wasn't too upset at the time as I was able to jump right into Eternity.

Which I loathed. None of the stuff that was good about Eon is in it, at all. I have to echo the sentiments of the other commenter and suggest you not bother with it at all.

Eon, Eternity and Beyond

[godelescherbach.livejournal.com]

Then there's "Legacy" by Bear, which is (AFAIK) a prequel to the first two.

Overall, I prefer the sequence that includes / ("Slant"), "Moving Mars", "Heads", "Queen of Angels".