Not long after Eon, he wrote Forge of God and its sequel Anvil of Stars, both of which are a study of character development in the face of incomprehensible aliens and worldbuilding on a scale that is difficult to understand. Pressured by the incoming wall of plasma, she finds the appropriate location for a doorway, but emerges to an Earth that diverged from our history several thousand years ago.

Math genius running around with a device to check the local value of π doesn't make for hard sci fi.Although these people can have almost anything they wish, nonetheless our heroine is miserable and lonely in this technological paradise. The problem here was AND weak characterization AND unrealistic behavior AND a bloated concept AND lackluster prose AND bullshit science with a serious veneer AND no jokes. She acts like a spoiled kid who occasionally goes into a trance-like stance and emerges with a breakthrough mathematical solution. The exploration of long abandoned cities from Humanity’s far future, the discovery of the Way, and the elements of transhumanism all combine to make this one of my favorite books.

It is really a shame that the writing is so poor, because the concepts introduced here are fantastic. The only let down for me, and it is a small one was that he tried to introduce the mores of the future, As Heinlein did in "Stranger in a strange land" and to a small extent he was right but the majority remain tied to an older tradition even now, well after this fiction takes place. I've been trying to catch up on some older SF classics and this series seemed like a good place to start. But for my taste, I think the review still stands: characters that behave in a totally unbelievable manner and handwavium disguised as science. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Europe had recently become a closer conglomerate and the US was clearly a leader in technology with only Japan echoing and surpassing the US at times. In fact, it feels like it should have been written more in the late 80's than the mid 90's, as the Cold War vibe is super strong, and the Russian antagonists just felt like lazy storytelling. In fairness Eon may well please many a true hard SF fan, but for me it's served mainly to reinforce my growing suspicion that this type of fiction is not for me. I was there, in the Thistledown, one of the team, ready to explore and learn and add to scientific knowledge and grow closer to myself and my teammates. In the event of major injury or even death, their implants (if recoverable and undamaged) can be used to "reload" their personalities into artificially reconstructed replicas of their old bodies, or even into entirely new forms.

With Earth’s presence, however, it would be possible to abandon the Way once again and go into orbit around Earth. Axis City had been waging war against aliens inhabiting the Way, and is presently facing the most serious attack, when the aliens threaten to open a doorway into the center of a star, thus flooding the Way with plasma. Often a little mystery only partly resolved leaves the reader with a sense of anticipation, and forces them to exercise their own imagination.Re-reading this book I felt like I was entering through the bore-hole for the first time and experiencing the asteroid anew.

This sounds like a distillate of the worst YA tropes wrapped up in a “serious” cloak… I know what you mean when you say that having read many books in the genre it takes something exceptional to keep your interest focused, and this one clearly is not. So that must mean Schwartzfeld's theory of antimatter propulsion holds up in two dimensions for periods of time significant enough for five of string theory's folded dimensions to balance out.I never tried touching the square root of space-time before so I cannot attest to whether it is in any way similar to trying to enter the singularity (which I have also never attempted for some reason). That said, this was a visionary, ambitious work of SF that was crammed full of ideas which is precisely what SF should be doing. 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. Apparently the inside of the asteroid is hollowed out and contains seven chambers wherein lie different "cities" or abandoned settlements. In the second half of the book, the theme of ideological conflict is continued through the growing tensions between the hardline political officers assigned to the Soviet force, and their more moderate military leader, Mirsky, who (like Vasquez) gains life-changing insights into the situation that faces them after being exposed to the accelerated learning facilities of the Stone's libraries.