Sometimes I worry that people will get the wrong impression about what I am trying to do here. Talking to a friend about this blog, they seemed to be under the impression that a good way forward with this blog would be to do the type of irate moaning often seen on certain youtube ‘review’ channels. That’s not really my style. I’d like to think I am saying this with a little bit more purpose, if perhaps a lot less style.
To be fair, I’ve said some mean things on this blog, and often without any kind of grace. I didn’t always work out too well for me, either. But persist I shall.
Eon is the story of an object that appears in our solar system, and the multinational research the ends up getting marooned there when the very object becomes the igniting factor that warms up the already heating cold war. The object, it would turn out, is from Earth’s future, and is inhabited by the refugee children of humanity, who used this object as a safe harbor from.
I thought this book was boring. I likely shouldn’t feel bad about saying that. Greg bear is going to continue living a kick ass life without me and my silly opinions of his book. And there are certainly worse things I could say about the book. I didn’t find it poorly written or pointless (criticism that I have had about other books), I just wasn’t over the moon for it. There have been other moments where I thought a book was objectively bad, and wondered how anyone ever put it to print. Eon just left me thinking that it was ‘just fine’.
I never really felt the weight of the loss that some of these characters must have been going through. They all went through something that, while distant, was likely incredibly traumatic. I never felt any of the chaos and terror the characters must have been going through if they were stuck on some alien craft with the knowledge that their home and loved ones were gone forever.
Perhaps I was distracted. The entire time I was reading this I couldn’t help but wonder why people weren’t more focused on the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of this story. The object in space was created as a refuge from the nuclear war on earth, which was caused by fighting largely over the object in space. It’s turtles all the way down, and I am pretty sure this makes the object some kind of eternal object. But there must be some kind of genesis point to all this, which I am sure is covered by either the sequel or prequel to this work. I am not sure I will focus my efforts on finding out.
Bear’s Blood Music has been on my to-read list for more months than I would like to confess, and I haven’t read it mostly because I am looking for an economical copy. Perhaps the best apology for this review is simply to say that I will still read that one. At some future point.
Failures in Polymathy 