Eon (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Robbins, Gary (November 22, 2022). "Greg Bear, prize-winning sci-fi author and Comic-Con co-founder, dies at 71". San Diego Union-Tribune . Retrieved November 26, 2022.

Award Winners & Nominees". Locus Awards Database. Archived from the original on June 5, 2011 . Retrieved July 11, 2009.

Bear cited Ray Bradbury as the most influential writer in his life. He met Bradbury in 1967 and had a lifelong correspondence. As a teenager, Bear attended Bradbury lectures and events in Southern California. [8] The descendants of the Stone's creators live a million kilometers into the Way and 1,200 years into Vasquez’s future, in a civilization called the Hexamon. They have been secretly observing the explorers. Olmy, a humanoid agent of the Hexamon, and his nameless Frant (alien) colleague, kidnap Vasquez because they understand that she is close to discovering secrets of the Stone and the Way. They take her to Axis City, their main settlement. Four of her colleagues search for her using a specially-modified V/STOL craft connected to a "tuberider", a device that allows the craft to be hitched to the tubular singularity that runs through the center of the Way.

The rescuers are intercepted when they near Axis City and reunited with Vasquez, who is caught up in the politics of the Hexamon. It is presided over by a governing body, the Nexus, loosely divided into two social groups: Progressive Geshels, who embrace body-swapping and life-extending technologies, and conservative Naderites. The latter are named after Ralph Nader, who has become identified with empathy and opposition to nuclear war in the centuries since his death. The Hexamon is threatened by alien invaders called the Jart, who are more adapted to the physics of the Way and live beyond its 2x10 Darwin's Radio (1999) Nebula Award winner, Hugo, Locus SF, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards nominee, 2000 [21] At the opening of the novel, in 2005, Judith Hoffmann, head of the commission that coordinates the exploration of the Stone, recruits a theoretical physicist. The physicist, Patricia Vasquez, arrives at the Stone and receives clearance for all the information discovered by the existing science teams, including libraries that describe a nuclear holocaust—“the Death”—taking place in 2005. Only some NATO science teams are privy to this information. Chinese and Russian science teams are present, but politically restricted.Gates are capped with cupolas formed from Space-time itself. As distortions in space-time geometry, their nature can be calculated by 21st century instruments laid on their 'surfaces'. The constant Pi, in particular, is most strongly affected. In the early 21st century, the United States and Russia are on the verge of nuclear war. In that tense political climate, an asteroid appears out of near space after an unusual supernova and settles into an extremely elliptical orbit near Earth orbit. The two nations each try to claim this mysterious object, which appears to be a virtual duplicate of Juno. It is hollow and contains seven vast terraformed chambers. Two of the chambers contain cities long abandoned by human beings who seemed to come from Earth's future. The asteroid is called the Thistledown by its builders. A startling discovery is that it is bigger inside than outside. The seventh chamber appears to stretch into infinity. By Journey Year 950, the Thistledown was empty, and history proceeded gently until the cataclysmic events of Journey Year 1175.