a pity
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I am a great fan of Greg Bear, and have thoroughly enjoyed his other work. This is not in the same league, however. The pace is slow, the descriptive passages (of the vegetation etc found on Lamarckia) rather too long, and the plot somewhat weak. A disappointing book, all in all, which is a shame; I found it hard to finish (never a good sign, when you keep checking how many pages are left). I would not recommend this.
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remarkable vision of an alien world
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This book is a kind of adjunct to the Eon/Eternity saga. It involves one of our heroes from those books, Olmy, on a much earlier mission to the extremely strange world of Lamarckia.
Bear's vision of this planet's ecosystem is characteristically mind-blowing. That he manages to make such a strange place seem real, and at the same time make a good fist of fleshing out Olmy's character, is a testament to what he can do when he's close to firing on all cylinders.
For me, though, the last section of the book is a let-down. An action-adventure set-piece is tacked on completely needlessly.
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Legacy - What made Olmy....
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I found this book very different from Eon and Eternity in style and content - the book features Olmy, a Hexamon agent, who features prominently in the other two books of this series. It wasn't quite my cup of tea really but is an intriguing view into a past events that profoundly moulded Olmy in his comparative youth. Olmy is at this point a young Hexamon agent sent to a wayward human colony on a planet called Lamarckia and has to face life on a very different planet with sentient vegetation and various 'human' social problems. I felt that this book added some more depth to the character of Olmy in Eon and Eternity but I would recommend it only as an addition to the series, not a standalone book.
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Not quite what i was hoping for
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After reading the two other books in this series 'Eon' and 'Eternity' I was very dissapointed that this book wondered off into a gardening documentory. No sharp Sci-fi here just a large biological rambling about a colonised planet which Olmy is sent to investigate. I only read it all because I thought that at some point it would change pace. Yawn..only read if you are a huge Greg Bear fan or if you are into the biology of supposedly sentinent plant life! No excitement, no technology, no awe ispiring story line.
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Brilliantly original prequel to Eon
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Although the 3rd in the Eon/Eternity trilogy, this is in effect a prequel to the other 2. The enigmatic fixer, Olmy endures decades of exile on an exotic planet with a mission to investigate an illegal colonisation. The real star of the book however is the planet Lamarckia, which is visualised with endless originality and invention. The processes of life on Lamarckia are grandiose and incomprehensible; the colonists struggle with war and starvation amid luxuriant growth. Although much will remain mysterious about the biology of the planet and its concealed sentiences, we are party to myriad wonders along Olmy's travels. The human drama is absorbing and tragic, and, as is usual with Greg Bear, handled as competently as by anyone in the literary mainsteam. (Hard SF this may be but it doesn't fetishize technology or descend into physics seminar.) My personal favourite SF book.
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