Review of Eon, the hardest sci-fi treat I've ever read. 5 Stars.
This meaty book sat unread on my physical bookshelf for many years, (then put in storage for almost two after I had to leave Sweden and camp out in my best friend's house during a brutal divorce). Now, in this new chapter of my life in a new country, I retrieved this book from its lonely place in the storage container to treat myself to a novel that demands some mental gymnastics. The wait was worth it. This book is unforgettable. A hard sci-fi novel that easily deserves to stand alongside the brilliance of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama.
I don't think I have ever come across such a depth of imagination in any other fiction or even film. This book goes to the limit and then pushes right past it into new and incredible concepts. Greg Bear has an imagination that feels enhanced, beyond his time and culture. He wrote this book in the 80s (first published in 1985) long before the Internet or any of the advantages we have gained through the rapid progression of research into quantum physics, the nature of reality, time, and the multiverse.
Just the fact that he created this incredible feat of fiction without any of these advantages, and that the concepts inside this book still stand up against what we have learned in the intervening years about the above is astonishing. This alone makes it worth anyone's time to invest in his mind-blowing work. I'm not sure how he did it, but I felt as I read this book that perhaps Greg Bear was not entirely one of us. This book is a gift to anyone who wants to explore concepts that take your mind to new and exciting places.
As this book was written during the Cold War, there are anachronistic details regarding this for the modern reader, however, reading this during the year that Russia has cruelly attacked Ukraine and the Western world has mobilized to help protect their democracy, there is a strange resonance to this old construct in a modern world.
TLDR;
Mind-blowing hard sci-fi concepts leave you thinking about just how much potential surrounds us - of other worlds, other times, and other entities - and grounds you in what really matters amidst all this magnificence.