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Rhita will eventually be driven to Central Asia where the “clavicle”, the tool that opens up the Way and used by Vasquez in a futile attempt to return home at the end of Eon is. Rhita journeys from Rhodes to Alexandria, seat of Imperial intrigue, where Vasquez eventually ended up after gaining some influence with Kleopatra, ruler of that Earth’s long-lived Ptolemic Dynasty. The story has three major arenas of conflict.

But, as the novel shows, contrast and conflict may not be necessary in the political universe of humans, but they are certainly a constant. “Contrast and conflict” are necessary to maintain a stable universe, Mirsky tells us in his deposition from the future. I liked the skeptical eye Bear cast – at least in seemed to me – on a couple of utopian notions that show up in sf novels: immortality and a unified humanity. Bear also casts a skeptical eye on that old value of political in a more coherent way than the earlier novel. Not only does the novel take the broad ramifications of those ideas seriously. The third reason I liked this novel better is its skepticism, or at least consideration, of the transhuman themes of uploaded minds, body modifications, and synthetic personalities. And, of course, Olmy, general fixer – military man, secret agent, and policeman – for the upper echelons of the Hexamon is back. Bear, however, would have been better off without the happy coda to the novel where Patricia gets returned to her family at the end in a world where Thistledown aka Stone doesn’t exist and, presumably, there will also be no nuclear war.Īmong the Hexamon, Konrad Korzenowski, creator of the Way, is back and a major player. Patricia Vasquez, the supergenius of Eon, is mostly offstage, but her granddaughter, Rhita, is a major character.

Of the Old Native stock, as the members of the Hexamon refer to the humans that survived the nuclear war of 2015, the major returning characters are Gary Lanier, now acting as a liaison and administrator between the Hexamon’s recovery efforts – managed, of course, from Thistledown orbiting Earth – and those stuck on Earth. Secondly, other characters from the prior novel appear, and they mostly manage to be more interesting this time. Now he’s back from the end of time and, seemingly, from another universe. He went off, down the Way with other humans at the end of Eon. One character describes the Way thus: "The tunnel itself an immense tapeworm curling through the guts of the real universe, pores opening onto other universes equally real but not our own, other times real and equally real" I liked this book better than its predecessor, Eon.įor one thing, Bear summed up the nature of the Way with a concise metaphor instead of the bits and pieces of, for me, confusing superscience that were in the last novel.