Eon by Greg Bear

Title: Eon
Author: Greg Bear
Publisher: Tor Books
503 pages.

A former sci-fi novel that's now become an alternate-history tale, Eon kicks ass.

It starts on Earth in the year 2000 (note: this book was written in 1985) when an asteroid suddenly appears in orbit around the Earth. This mysterious appearance doesn't go unnoticed or unstudied, and it's eventually determined that the asteroid's been hollowed out into 7 massive cylindrical chambers, which were inhabited several hundred years ago by humans.

However, there's something odd about the seventh chamber. More on that later.

Anyway, in the first six chambers, astronauts sent up by the United States and the Soviet Union (yes, in 2000--like I said, it qualifies as alternate-history these days) find all kinds of freaky shit. Each chamber is 30km long and 50km in diameter and are linked end-to-end, and the whole asteroid is spun just so to provide Earthlike gravity along the inner wall of each cylinder. Since the thing is so enormous, there are whole cities, farms, and forests inside the asteroid.

The cities are where the truly interesting things start to happen. The human explorers decide to set up stations in the asteroid and import scientists to study the rock. At this point, the plot gives way to a second story, which involves a man named Olmy, which is basically all that is comprehensible about it. The rest of the book vacillates between Olmy and the explorers.

Really, the lynchpin of the whole book is Patricia Luisa Vasquez, a Californian physicist with some truly strange ideas. As she travels up to the rock and investigations continue, she finds out the ultra-classified secret of the asteroid: it's from the future. And everyone's hoping it's not from their future because if it is, that means Earth is going boom in just a few weeks.

Whoops. However, in my head, that's fucking nothing compared to the other secret, this one involving the seventh chamber.

It's made more or less the same as the other six, with one exception: it doesn't have a cap at the "north" end. It just keeps going. And going. And going. It's basically an artificial universe generated by the greatest Engineer of all time, Konrad Korzenowski, who was (or will be? Hmm) a student of...you guessed it. Patricia Luisa Vasquez.

Apparently in future history, Earth goes boom, human society re-establishes itself based on principles developed in the aftermath of the war, and becomes super-scientific. So they decide to leave Earth and develop an asteroid, which they name "Thistledown," and live there in the cities they've built. They're so technologically advanced most of them don't really bother with bodies, and if they do, they treat it like an art form. And of course, Korzenowski builds a sixth chamber chock full of mysterious machinery and co-opts the seventh chamber to build his own private universe. Once it all works, he tells everyone and they all migrate into the seventh chamber. Because of the sheer relativistic weirdness involved in constructing your own universe, a singularity (referred to as the "flaw") runs down the middle, which they use for transportation and to hold their main beacon of civilization, named the Axis City. This consists of several huge geometrical forms strung on the flaw like beads on a necklace, in which everyone lives, several million miles into the seventh chamber.

Of course, the story gets much, much deeper. Due to the nature of this universe (dubbed "the Way" by its inhabitants), it's possible to open gates to other planets and universes, so Axis City serves as the nexus of thousands of worlds and species as well, and governs commerce between all those. And its government is called the "Hexamon Nexus," or "the Hexamon" or "the Nexus" for short.

Okay. Now that the backstory's done...we move on to the plot.

Jesus Christ, fuck it. I don't give a shit about the plot. It can go piss in a nun's mouth for all I shit on it. Moving on.

Scale: You're shitting me, right? A time-traveling asteroid containing an artificial universe that serves as the nexus of commerce between millions of alternate universes? 5.

Audacity: Again with the shitting. 5.

Engagement: Aha! Here we come to the crotch of the matter. There's a lot of talk about math, gravitational physics, and the Way, but for someone like me, it's incredibly boner-inducing. For an average person, though? The slow set-up and admittedly unimpressive climax (although the Russian invasion of Thistledown was hugely creative) might turn some people off. Call it an even 3.

Characterization: I scoff and thumb my balls at characterization in this book. The characters aren't that sympathetic--it's a mass of obsessed intellectuals living in the middle of the most incredible accomplishment of the human race, watching Earth poof. The point of this book isn't character development--it's about the human species and the amazing ideas it can dream up. Give it a 3.

Sexiness: Yeah, there's sex. Suli Ram Kikura (a sort of Hexamon lawyer) is cute, Patricia Luisa Vasquez, though spooky, is a horny slut, and Judith Hoffman is a sexily powerful lady. Then there's just the sheer grandeur of concept expressed in this book. 5, damn your eyes.

Average: 4.2. Fuck numbers, if you're hardcore like me, read it. If you're not, your eyes will eventually be plucked out and used to grow a creature with really good eyesight that'll kill you just by looking at you with your own eyes.

Or something.

Metaplanetary

So for non-anthologies, I'll do a summary and then rate it based on five criteria. They're completely arbitrary.

Metaplanetary by Tony Daniel

The tagline on the cover reads "A novel of interplanetary civil war." That about sums it up. The story takes place in the 31st Century, when all of the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars for the Down's Syndromers out there) are linked by a vast network of nanotechnologically constructed cables that serve as transportation, housing, and really cool decoration. The outer planets don't have any cables, and as such are sort of the rugged frontier.

Nanotech is the driving force here. They've developed and refined it so much that it can do basically anything. God, I love this book so much I have no fucking idea how to even begin to explain. To start, nanotech is called "grist," which is where the address for this blog comes from, and which I think is cool. It's fucking everywhere and provides the basis for the merci, their version of the Internet, which has mutated into this monstrous construct that basically serves as an artificial universe that people practically live in, which is enabled by the grist that their bodies are practically made of. It's so refined that it works on the quantum level, using the properties of entangled particles to communicate faster than light.

In fact, it's so ingrained in human life that basically everyone can be split up into three parts: the aspect, which is the actual human body; the pellicle, which is the grist that's interpenetrated the body and even extends out into a cloud around the person and can do basically anything; and the convert, which is the electronic version of the person that inhabits the pellicle. Because of this setup, people have an unfortunate tendency to turn into Large Arrays of Personalities, which basically means the same mind inhabits multiple bodies, which can look like anything. Some of the biggest LAPs are cloudships, which are essentially huge conglomerations of grist that have accreted asteroid material around a human body (which is strictly optional) and which are maintained by physical copies of the controlling intelligence.

Actually, that's what the entire book revolves around. This dude who got beat up by drunkard daddy in the sewer of the inner planets takes over the government and starts "consolidating"--basically taking over all the grist in the solar system and incorporating it into himself. The inner system is so moronically addicted to merci entertainment that they're actually into the idea, while the outer system, which is a bit less accessible, fights back. Hence the "civil war"--although the entire solar system is technically subject to a single government based on Mercury, the outer system decides to secede and fight compu-Hitler. And no, that's not a ridiculous comparison. Apparently this guy hates individuality so much that he rounds up all the pure AIs he can find floating around in the grist and detains them in some camp on Mars where they basically have to spend their lives counting grains of sand until they go nuts.

There are some heroes, of course, and some villains. One of the more interesting ones is this guy called Tod who's nine feet tall, triple-jointed everywhere, and who apparently was designed to see the future, but experiences so much quantum interference that he's basically shitbags. He's called a "time tower." Another guy works on the same principle, but in his case, it was so successful that he became the future in some vague way. *shrug* I don't pretend to understand it, and neither does the author, apparently.

In any case, it's a pretty complete novel, written as part of a trilogy. There's a very, very detailed and believable history of quantum physics ("spooky" instantaneous info transfer at a distance) and its applications to nanotech, which enables all of this stuff to happen. There's lots of sex, lots of fucking strange shit (this guy pukes and the chunder turns into a woman), lots of action, lots of oh-wow stuff, lots of...goddammit. I'm going to re-read it.

Scale: Pretty huge. Covers basically all the bodies in the solar systems, asteroids and cables included (and in one case, the sun itself). Really, it's an epic. Call it a 5.

Audacity: A fat man's diarrhea-load of it. This guy's 31st Century is so far-out it's believable. Another 5.

Engagement: It can be easy to get lost between all the character/storyline shifts that try to unify underneath the larger arc of civil war. Then there are the chapters that focus on establishing the history and technological advancement, which can get pretty technical. Put it at a 3.

Characterization: Pretty big ensemble cast here. Most of them are pretty relatable--12-year-old girl who gets cut off from her AI mom and becomes a guerrilla, disenchanted priest who gets mixed up with some major figures, etc. Some are kind of too fucked-up to really get into, like the time tower, who's just too closed-off, or the dictator who really wasn't too, uh, sane from the start, no matter how much Papa carved up his back with a broken bottle. Eh...4.

Sexiness: Yeah, lots of it. The sheer sci-fi is boner-inducing, and there's plenty of copulation going on as well. Check out the truly bizarre sex scene between the dwarf and ferret inside the giant pumpkin-like shuttle. 5.

Average: 4.4. Just fucking read it, okay.

The sequel, Superluminal, was released a couple of years ago, but I probably should re-read it. Because I want to.