Eon (novel)

Eon

The cover art of Eon
Author	Greg Bear
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	The Way
Genre	Science fiction novel
Published	1985 (Tor Books)
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	503
ISBN
Followed by	Eternity

Eon is a 1985 science fiction novel by Greg Bear. It is the first story written in The Way fictional universe.

Events in Eon take place in 2005, when the U.S. and U.S.S.R. are on the verge of nuclear war. In that tense political climate, a 290 km asteroid is detected, following an anomalous and very powerful energy burst just outside the solar system. The asteroid moves into a highly eccentric Near-Earth orbit, and the two nations each try to claim this mysterious object (dubbed "the Stone" by the Americans and "the Potato" by the Soviets, with the Chinese using , meaning "whale"), with the U.S. and N.A.T.O. allied nations succeeding. Eon was nominated for an Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987.

The asteroid itself is an elongated prolate spheroid which appears to be virtually identical to Juno, a large asteroid in the main belt. It has been hollowed out along its long axis, and subdivided into seven vast cylindrical chambers, and rotates to provide artificial gravity. The chambers are terraformed, with the second and third containing vast abandoned cities which have been maintained by automatic systems for centuries. As the Earth investigators explore the asteroid's interior, they make an even more stunning discovery — the end of the Stone's seventh chamber opens out into a vast cylindrical corridor ("The Way"), a "pocket universe" that extends far beyond the physical limit of the asteroid, and may possibly be infinite. These discoveries indicate both that the Stone's creators (who are dubbed the "Stoners") have mastered the technology to open portals into other dimensions and alternate universes, and that, for unknown reasons, these original inhabitants had been evacuated from the Stone at some time in its past, and could well be living somewhere further along the Way.

However, the momentous discovery of The Way is overshadowed by a far more pressing problem, uncovered in the records in the libraries of the abandoned cities. The investigators learn that the Stone is indeed Juno, and that it has been shaped into a massive starship by humans from Earth's future, whose ancestors had escaped a global nuclear holocaust in the early 21st century. Most disturbingly of all, they realize that these "histories" match events on present-day Earth almost precisely, and that they therefore predict Earth's immediate future — making it almost certain that a global nuclear war is imminent.