Some books explode with a sense of wonder. This is one of them. ( )

Cool concept, semi-interesting characters, indescribable locations, confusing plot. ( )

Started off really interesting, bit I started getting lost half way through. I found the ending very underwhelming. ( )

I love Big Dumb Object stories, and it's hard to resist gateway-to-multiverse passageways; it's no surprise I devoured this book when it first came out. I was in my mid-twenties and it seemed smart hard-SF as a genre was coming of age. The time was ripe for a revisit this summer.

There is a great BDO here, and a fairly rich puzzle-box involving the builders and their potential nature and needs. The set-up prepares the reader for a great trip. But. So, Bear is gifted at conceiving brilliant, large-scale ideas and wrapping them with conceptual breakthroughs; this is fact. But, much like Clarke before him, he paints watercolor characters and anchors to sociopolitical systems of quickly-dated structures and, like Niven, he buries the Sense of Wonder he tries to foster with imaginary-but-overexplained technologies and numbing technobabble. "Eon" suffers clearly from these weaknesses: it's difficult to feel for characters that are wireframes with specific job skills, and more words are used to describe devices that don't exist than to the actual motions people are taking within the scenery. While "Eon" really is dated in terms of the Cold War geopolitics and the social organization of the various teams involved, it is perhaps more dated in the advances that have occurred within published SF since 1985. Where characters, plot pacing, and use of language to immerse the reader are concerned, this reads much more like an Asimov novel from the 1950s than it does a comparable SF epic of the current day, like Tchaikovsky's "The Doors of Eden," Martine's "A Memory Called Empire," or Reynolds' "Revelation Space." It's still worth reading, but it's neither fresh nor particularly exciting ( )

i really liked this at first, and it was showing up in my dreams, which may be good and may be bad. despite the fact that i had trouble visualizing the spaces and even some of the actions in the book, and that aside from a solid four or five main ones all of the characters seemed to blend into an indistinguishable mass, i was along for the ride. the mysteries were interesting and we were discovering them along with the lead character, which built up layering feelings of various tensions nicely.

then the story shifted, and it got way too theoretical and even harder to picture for my liberal-arts-trained mind, and from that point on i just wanted it to be over. there was no mystery, just exposition of complicated scientific concepts poorly told. i found myself unwilling to care what happened to most of the characters. and each successive one of the many endings grew more and more anticlimactic and uninteresting to me.

i understand there are sequels. i will not be reading them. ( )