Eon was published by Bluejay Books in 1985, the same year as Blood Music, and the two novels together established Bear as the preeminent hard science fiction writer of his generation. Where Blood Music dealt with biology and nanotechnology, Eon deals with physics and cosmology on a scale that dwarfs anything in the genre.
The Stone — officially designated Thistledown — appears in Earth orbit: an asteroid three hundred kilometers long, hollow, containing seven vast chambers that hold the ruins of a future human civilization. But the seventh chamber is the one that breaks the mind: it opens onto the Way, an infinite corridor that extends beyond the physical universe into a dimension where the laws of physics can be manipulated at will. The Way is not a natural phenomenon — it was manufactured, and the civilization that manufactured it has moved into it, leaving the Stone behind.
The novel is set against the backdrop of Cold War nuclear tensions (the Stone arrives in the early twenty-first century, when the superpowers are on the brink of war), and Bear weaves the geopolitical thriller into the science fiction with remarkable skill. The American and Soviet teams exploring the Stone are racing against each other even as they struggle to comprehend what they have found, and the nuclear war that eventually erupts on Earth below provides a grim counterpoint to the transcendent possibilities represented by the Way.
Collecting Eon
First edition (Bluejay Books, New York, 1985): Cloth binding, dust jacket. Bluejay Books was a short-lived SF publisher, making this first edition scarcer than later Tor printings.
Market values:
- First edition (Bluejay) in dust jacket: $40–$150
- Tor reprint first edition: $10–$25
- Paperback editions: $5–$10