The premise is cool: a hollow asteroid arrives in Earth orbit, containing construction that is centuries old yet seems to have been built by humans, with libraries referencing our present as history. And it’s larger on the inside: the tubular corridor, wide enough in diameter to hold a city, goes on possibly forever. We learn that the Stone comes from a parallel universe, where its original purpose was to travel to a new star system; but when its occupants mastered a kind of space-manipulation technology, they decided to retreat into their own constructed universe—the corridor, aka the Way—from which they could open gates into parallel universes at various points in those universes’ histories.
The execution leaves much to be desired. It’s a long book and I was glad to be done with it. The characters are shallow and uninteresting. Much of the plot consists of the main characters observing a sequence of events they have little control over and that we haven’t been given the proper background to have an emotional investment in or suspension-of-disbelief for. There’s a degree of mysticism toward the end that seems out-of-place.
It’s a very Cold War novel and the negative attitude toward Russians is a bit over-the-top at times. There was one particularly eye-roll-inducing moment for me. The Russian commander—Mirsky—has lost faith in Soviet dogma because the library from the future has revealed to him how hypocritical and deceptive Soviet leadership was. He shares this information with the political officer—Vielgorsky—who is also aggrieved to learn these things. Mirsky decides “he would now judge his country and all it stood for by how Vielgorsky acted”. And you know what the book has happen after that rather melodramatic pronouncement? Vielgorsky shoots Mirsky in the head and tries to destroy the library.
Everything in the book related to sex is really cringe, too. It’s preoccupied with this idea that hypercompetent people need sex provided for them so they can stay focused on their work. E.g., when the American commander Lanier confesses to one of his subordinates that he’s “been… horny for the last twenty hours”, she says “[a]nything that keeps you from thinking straight is a detriment to our mission”, and has sex with him. Later, another subordinate—the math genius Vasquez—asks the same guy to have sex with her because she’s too distracted by horniness. Ugh.