One important spoiler! (Again, it’s a great book. Go read it.)
Another of my favorite SF books from the 80s and 90s is Greg Bear’s Eon. At one point it seemed to me that Greg Bear was looking through the SF pantheon for books with great ideas that never really went anywhere and started doing rewrites where he took some amazing concept off the shelf and wrote a story around it. Eon seemed to me to be taking the wonder and promise of Rendezvous with Rama and going beyond it in all respects.
One of the interesting things about Eon is that it was a book with a lot of Russian — or more accurately Soviet — characters written in the pre-Glaznost era. For those of you not familiar with the Cold War, our relationship with the USSR went through a rapid evolution from the early 70s, during which we signed a bunch of arms control agreements and fell in love with Eastern bloc gymnasts and things seemed to be improving, through to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense program where things got markedly worse, the death of Leonid Brezhnev which was followed by a quick succession of guys who were dying when they got to power, and then the appearance of Mikhael Gorbachev, who — with the help of Reagan and Thatcher — reduced tensions and eventually made the peaceful end of the Cold War possible in, shall we say, 1989.
Eon was published in 1985, which means it was probably written a year or two earlier — at the height of US-Soviet tensions, and it portrays both the Americans and their Russian counterparts as more doctrinaire, paranoid, and xenophobic than the reader is likely to be. Set around 2005, the Earth is significantly more advanced technologically than we now know it was at the time, but a lot of the timeline is ridiculously optimistic (and there are throwaway comments such as the US orbital missile defense platforms having been far more effective than anyone expected in the limited nuclear exchange of the 90s).
When I first read Eon, I can remember being on the cusp of giving up on it as the politics seemed so right-wing. The Russians were bad guys and the Americans were kind of idiotically blinkered. I made allowances for the fact that the setting included a historical nuclear exchange between Russia and the US which certainly would justify bad feelings, but which itself was predicated on the US and Russians being a lot more bone-headed than the real US and Russians seemed to be.
I should note that I read Eon shortly after it was published, and Gorky Park had been published five years earlier and adapted as a movie in 1983. So it’s not like there weren’t far more nuanced portrayals of Soviets citizens in mainstream popular culture despite increasing Cold War tensions and the invasion of Afghanistan.
The Wikipedia entry for Eon is pretty sparse, but claims that:
the concept of parallel universes, alternate timelines and the manipulation of space-time itself are major themes in the latter half of the novel.
Note: I don’t really think books have “themes”. I think it’s a post-hoc construction by literary critics that some writers (and film makers) have been fooled by.
It’s surprising to me then that something Greg Bear makes explicit and obvious not long into the novel is that the entire story takes place in an alternate universe. He actually compromises the science in what is a pretty hard SF novel to make the point clear: Patricia Vasquez (the main protagonist) is a mathematician tasked with understanding the physics of the seventh chamber. To do this she has technicians make her a “multimeter” that measures various mathematical and physical constants to make it possible to detect distortions in space-time — boundaries between universes. Upon receiving it, she immediately checks to see it is working and looks at the value of Pi, which is shown to be wrong.
Anyone with a solid background in Physics or Math will tell you that changing the value of Ï€ is just not possible without breaking Math. (The prominence of Ï€ in Carl Sagan’s Contact is slightly less annoying, since it is taken to be a message from The Creator. The implication being that The Creator exists outside Math, which is more mind-boggling than living outside Time, say.) It’s far more conceivable to mess with measured and — seemingly — arbitrary constants such as electro-permeability, the Planck constant, gravity, the charge on the electron, and so forth, and some of these are mentioned. But most people don’t know them to eight or ten places by heart and lack a ubiquitous device that will display them, so (I assume) Bear chose Ï€.
My point is, once it’s clear and explicit that Eon is set in an alternate universe the question switches from “is Bear some kind of right-wing nut-job like so many otherwise excellent SF writers” (which he doesn’t seem to be, based on his other novels) to “does the universe he is describing make internal sense”? It also, I suspect, makes it harder to turn this novel into a commercially successful TV series or movie. Which is a damn shame.