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Books by Greg Bear
Eon
by Greg Bear
· published 1985 · read 2023-01-07
★★☆☆☆
Big Dumb Object, but without the Dumb, as the Object is actually load-bearing and has context and faux-science attached to it. Sadly not great for me: The old sci-fi disease of being better at conjuring up scenarios than at having characters interact. The best indicator is that while the Big Dumb Object wasn't dumb, the protagonist (genius field-medalist scientist) had all the feeling and impact of a prop with a hand-written "genius btw" sign attached. That sounds a bit harsh: The book did start out pretty cool, but then just dropped off and failed to convince. To be fair, there were long stretches where the characters don't interact and just think, and those worked surprisingly well! But especially the second half had way, way too many ideas and zero coherence, and then descended into science babble + "oops, we need an ending". Cool things: The fact they had procedures to take people through the shock-and-awe they experienced when seeing the object the first time. The handling of crew relationships. Got smartphones about right. Stupid things: the Russians (good god, the potato). The futurist alien society – there were enough cool ideas in there to fill three books, and none of them got to shine. The ending. The sex. Side note 1: It was pretty hard to judge how old the book was: the mood is very "processing the height of the cold wars", but the characters (and particularly the treatment of women) felt modern. I only looked up when it was written halfway through, and was a bit surprised. Side note 2: this was the first book I read for my now-beloved book club! And the discussion was a lot of fun – as always, more interesting when only some people like the book. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.