For those of you who haven't read Eon, the asteroid appears in our solar system from another universe, one closely paralleling our own, and enters orbit around Earth.

Although these people can have almost anything they wish, nonetheless our heroine is miserable and lonely in this technological paradise. Be it good prose, or insight in the human condition, or wild ideas about science, or just a sense of escapist wonder.The Stone is a hollowed out asteroid; containing seven chambers each with their own landscape and cities. A Soviet attack on the Stone coincides with the Death, which triggers a nuclear winter on Earth and isolates survivors from all factions on the Stone. And plus, when the scientists go and explore it, or the guy in House of Leaves rides off on his bike to investigate the vastness of the House, it's like when kids in stories find doors in trees or in the back of wardrobes and they get to explore a magical kingdom. But she spends most of the book in some kind of haze, as if she can’t quite believe what’s happening. It turns out that the original inhabitants of the Stone have constructed a city, which is traveling long the Way, the long tunnel from the last chamber.

So, for instance, Rama in Arthur Clarke's Rama books is one, the Ringworld in Ringworld by Larry Niven is another, the house in House of Leaves is one, apparently there's a giant black hole known as the Unicron singularity in Transformers: Cybertron so that's another, and it goes on and on. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama, but he also wanted to give something to those who felt Rama cheated them out of a plot.The only time I was ever invested was when the rogue intelligence was meddling in the affairs of our human protagonists. There’s a sub-genre of sci-fi referred to as “Big Dumb Object” for stories about big, wondrous objects that defy explination or have some sort of air of mystery to them.

Because the knowledge some selected few gained is almost making them lose their minds and in their desperate attempt to understand and prevent certain events, their secrecy is exactly what triggers the calamity nobody wanted. This confirms an earlier suspicion, as I thought I saw paragraphs the first time I checked it on the app right after posting. This splits one's sympathies so that the reader never fully invests in one character's interests - this leaves one too much outside the story, looking in. Overall I would recommend this book and have already bought the next one to see where the story goes.Explorers of its interior discover that the end of the Stone's seventh chamber opens into “the Way”, a corridor that extends beyond the size of the asteroid. But I'll still say that this is probably one of those books whose basic idea is so good that, nearly no matter how boring you will find one of the subplots, you just have to love it. The only character that exhibits some kind of development is Lanier, when in a moment of weakness starts a relationship with one of the other scientists, and that’s when I took a liking to him. If I’d read it two years earlier, I might have been tempted to give him another shot; as it was, I had my sights on other things.

As time is not an issue, let’s not brief her fully ASAP so she can get to work, but let her experience this strange hollow asteroid herself, browse its libraries, appreciate its interior design computer programs. If so, I remember starting it and being taken through a room-by-room tour that was lots and lots of Tell and very Little Show…and it just seemed to go on and on and on to no discernable purpose. Granted the Soviet Union gave up on communism a few years after publication and the idea of it still existing seems to have put a few reviewers off their stride.The sheer number of characters, minor story arcs, and mind boggling concepts explored was too much for a single book. Have fond memories of a book from the 80's that you read in the 90's when you were maybe 15 years old? Eon is quite well written and the characters are developed to some extent but they never really come alive for me, perhaps there is too much plot and world building to cover to allow room to flesh out the characters. There were two points when women threw themselves at him at awkward times (once I actually blurted out, "oh, for fuck's sake").