Eon

Greg Bear

1985

It's a new millennium and it's heralded not by disaster but by an object zipping into Earth orbit. It was clear from the first time it was detected that the object was not there by natural design for it was heralded by a massive burst of radiation.

Determined to be first there, the American government put the whole thing under the tightest of wraps, only allowing their closest allies any access at all and even then, only most reluctantly.

Under pressure from the power blocs on Earth, the original secrecy was reduced and the world learned that the newcomer to their skies had been hollowed out inside with supposedly seven chambers but NASA wasn't saying a word. Rumours that some of the chambers were filled with alien remains were categorically denied.

Patricia Vasquez was the leading theoretical mathematician of her day so when she received a mysterious request to join a government project she's already prepared to be journeying up to the Stone.

But she isn't prepared for what she finds there. For NASA hadn't been lying - not precisely anyhow, when they said there were no alien remnants on the Stone.

The vast cities that filled a couple of the chambers had been built by beings whose ancestors had been born on Earth and there were huge libraries filled with books that had yet to be published.

And books about the nuclear war that would sweep the planet in a couple of months.

The one thing that gave those far too few people in the know a slight sense of hope was the knowledge that their reality was not the original history of Stone. But did the timelines diverge enough to allow them to escape the forthcoming war all together?

Is the Stone as deserted as it looked?

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Greg Bear didn't do too badly in anticipating some of the things that would be occurring in the early part of this century. Like many people he does assume that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact would still be around but the technological imbalance between the fSU and the West is still present. The people in this timeline are more space capable than in ours too.

It also has to be said that Stone is one of Science Fiction's biggest BDOs (See here for a definition for Big Dumb Object) :-).

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This is part of the Science Fiction Masterworks series.

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