"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. 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. So, Bear is gifted at conceiving brilliant, large-scale ideas and wrapping them with conceptual breakthroughs this is fact. The set-up prepares the reader for a great trip. There is a great BDO here, and a fairly rich puzzle-box involving the builders and their potential nature and needs. The time was ripe for a revisit this summer. I was in my mid-twenties and it seemed smart hard-SF as a genre was coming of age. 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.
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