Eon / Greg Bear

Eon

category: science fiction, author:

Greg Bear

original copyright 1985,
read in October 2010

Agamedes' opinion: 6 out of 10

This book is "a triumph of soaring imagination and huge detail." It says so on the back cover. And it's true. Unfortunately soaring imagination and huge detail are not enough to make a great novel.

Early on I decided, there are too many characters, I won't try to remember them all. So there are dozens of characters doing things for no apparent reason... Who is that? I wonder, Why are they doing that? Sure, it's a sign of a lazy reader. It's also a sign that the author has failed to fully capture my attention.

There is also the huge detail of the science... Again, I simply looked at the words and didn't bother to try to absorb.

Do you remember the very first Star Trek movie? All the great Star Trek characters, a great plot for a Star Trek episode -- stretched out to a full length movie. How did they stretch that movie? By including lots of slow fly-bys of the model spaceships. Boring!

Compare that to the original Star Wars movie: non-stop action, a Western set in space. Robots, spaceships, planets, movie models of all shapes and descriptions -- but all just background. The movie action rolls right along and the models are just, well, just there. Background. Adding depth to the action.

With Eon, Bear has taken the Star Trek approach: stretched out the action with boring details of the technology. Futuristic? Great. Exciting shapes and colours? Very nice. But what about advancing the plot?!

The plot itself is, sort of, interesting. A story of its time, 1985. With 1985 politics and one-eyed patriotism extended a thousand years into the future. Somewhat dated but still interesting.

More interesting is the human response to alien threat.

Aggressive aliens threaten to dump a star into the battleground, to wipe out all life -- human and alien -- in order to... well, I'm not sure. Perhaps this is Bear's reference to MAD, the mutually assured nuclear destruction of his era: we'll all be dead but so will you. So how do the humans -- the psychologically adjusted, peace loving humans of the far future -- how do these humans respond?

These peace-loving humans use their own methods to wipe out all life on the battlefield. They make all uninhabitable. At least the humans intend to survive, by moving on past the huge area of destruction. Oh well, a response for the times, I guess: You threaten me and I'll wipe your alien selves from the surface of this world...

Finally, as a sort of icing on the cake of boredom, Bear uses the then-fashionable parallel worlds theory. Which makes a nonsense of all the strife and striving...

Let's go back and help the world recover from nuclear devastation! Why bother? There is still an infinity of parallel worlds which we will not be helping. Worse yet: One woman actually decides to "go home" -- to a parallel universe where (a) nuclear devastation did not happen and (b) she does not exist but her family and boyfriend do... Riiiiiggght.

Once you introduce parallel worlds, all efforts are pointless. Sure, you may be able to find a world where "you win". But there will still be an infinite number of other parallel worlds where -- "you lose". By "winning" here you guarantee that you will have "lost" somewhere else.

Leave the parallel worlds to the quantum physicists. All it does for a novel, is to make all the protagonists' efforts, pointless.

..o0o..

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