The biggest difference between the stories written at the beginning of the eighties and at the end is Bear's development of a sort of conscience - "Blood Music" is a gosh-wow look at what the hardware (or floppy ware) can do story, and the new story "Sisters" is not. "Sisters" will be developed into a novel Queen Of Angels. It describes a schoolgirl who has not been genetically enhanced, and is therefore less than perfect in a school where parents have normally taken half their children's genotype from the testtube. Then the girl who has been an oddity and an outcast learns that the gene splicing has also introduced the risk of death into the recipients as she sees some of her classmates die and the others live in the fear of that happening to them. How does someone who is normal react to people who should be better, but are plunged into things far worse by their attempted improvement? With pity, assistance, smugness or what?
Not all the stories here are good, but it is not a disappointing collection.
Legend is the new trade size imprint from Arrow Books and Eon is the first in the series. Things look bad. The cover bears the words "The greatest science fiction novel of our time", and an illustration which is slightly inaccurate. The quote is totally inaccurate.
At the end of the twentieth century a converted asteroid has gone into orbit around the Earth. The Americans have managed to keep the Soviets out and the Chinese under restraint, so they can keep to themselves the fact that the Stone is hollow, contains deserted cities and has come from Earth's future, with a passageway in it leading millions of miles (as in the Tardis) to no one knows where. Earth has already had one nuclear war but another is likely (mainly due to the Soviets' dislike or Star Wars). For a week or two Earth experiences alternate histories (where a nuclear war starts in the Stone's records of the period and does not in reality) and then the Earth is exterminated, leaving only a few moonbases and satellites, and the Americans and their Spetznaz invaders to live on in the Stone. All this has happened by about page two hundred, but the sotry and the reader's interest has begun to flag by about page 70. After interminable battles in which the Soviet troops are driven on by their unbendingly bigotted political officers, it is reveled that the Stone still has residents who have become disembodied but themselves are divided into factions intent on provoking fights with the others.
Eon contains references to a lot - advanced maths, advanced architecture, esoteric physics - yet for a work so concerned with extra dimensions the characters are wooden and the plotting rotten and padded.
The book implicitly refers to others, most notably Rendezvous With Rama. For example, where Rama had lakes and dams to soak up inertia when deccelerating, the Stone does not require this dampening, while the last chapter (a surprising little kick) takes us into the worlds of H. Beam Piper's paratime.
However, most disquieting is the book's attitudes to science and politics. In the Acknowledgement Bear lists the Citizen's Advisory Council on National Space Policy ("Citizen" here means member of a small US right-wing pressure group). An account of the CACNSP by Gregory Benford, "Dancing With the StrawMan", can be found in Far Frontiers vol V, Spring 1986. It details how the group, of whom Benford was one, in the early eighties produced the idea of SDI and sold it to the White House - "Here was the President, using phrases and ideas that first surfaced in casual swimming-pool talk less than a year before ... But with a sinking feeling I heard Reagan envision a total defence of our population". It goes on to describe how Arthur C. Clarke, who was opposed to the pollution of space by weapons but whose early astronautics work could be used in SDI, was attacked by the group - "Heinlein attacked as soon as Clarke settled into Larry Niven's living room ... Foreigners on our soil should step softly in discussions of our policies, Heinlein said. Clarke was guilty of 'British arrogance'". So, in the words of the Star Warriors, it will not protect evan all the USA and the rest of the world can go hang.
If these people were so concerned with Soviet Communism they would be concerned with ending it, not defending themselves from it. Eon shares every fault in their thinking and is written with an equal lack of immagination. It desmonstrates how a work of fiction can be ruined by its underlying philosophy. But perhaps the person to have written a better book would have been more concerned with better ideas. When you think that Arrow published the paperback editions of The Book of the New Sun, you have to wonder what's gone wrong so quickly that they should choose this as their lead title, and call it "good" let alone "the greatest". Eon was a great disappointment to me.
STRENGTH OF STONES by Greg Bear (VGSF 1992 pp221 £3.99)
This is a fix-up of three stories, which imply events even more interesting happening before the book begins. The millenium will not come in the year 2000 and the Moslems will create such wars that they will be globally reviled. Eventually the three theistic religions will form a pact and all take themselves off to another planet in another galaxy. On that planet, which they call God-Does-Battle, which seems to be the Sinai Desert made bigger, they inhabit enormous movable arcologies. Unfortunately, the arcologies have built in moral standards, and it finds the people not worthy and expels them into the desert where they degenerate for eons. The book begins here.
The cities are losing their power to replicate so long has passed; various tribal leaders are attacking the cities partly to support their drive for power. Reah is a good woman who is allowed into one of the remaining cities and explores it (shades here of Greg Bear's bigger exploration in Eon). She bears a child who grows up inside convinced of his moral worth, who decides to end these last remnants of ancient civilisation. Then a deus ex machina literally appears - a replicant of the original architect - who struggles to bring back something of learning and culture. So far have the people declined that this includes all knowledge of the stars above them, so that the Moslems cannot orientate themselves towards Mecca. It is with this little piece of learning and its promise for the future that the book ends.
Like Gormenghast, Rama or Eon the main interest of this book is in discovering the grandeur of the ruins. Greg Bear does that well, everything else by comparison is decoration. It is not everyone who builds a build with the intention of having die of old age.