Another Dave Langford review. It is a legitimate goal of SF to boggle the reader with huge ideas, colossal magnitudes, stupefyingly immense distances.
Infinity is a different country, and they even do addition differently there.
The Way, in fact, is an ambitious and involving creation which is the real hero of Eon . On the debit side, the human characters are less successfully drawn, and the politics of 2005 seem designed not so much for plausibility as to provide an excuse for exciting free-fall battles while Earth burns. All this background is needed to tackle Eternity , a sequel which tells us at considerable length what happened next. Gosh, Greg Bear is a destructive chap. We have had the transformation of Earth's biosphere in Blood Music , nuclear holocaust by way of mere colourful background to Eon , and the smashing of Earth itself in The Forge of God .