The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 April 2006
Book One of A Time Odyssey
by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
This book seems to have originated in two premises. First: what if we take Arthur Clarke's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and create an "orthogonal" story, in which the intervening aliens are not all that benevolent, after all? Second: what would happen if the armies of Alexander the Great and Ghengis Khan were to meet on the fields of ancient Babylon, with a few 19th-century British colonial soldiers thrown in? Either makes a fairly good basis for fantasy fiction. Both together make for a somewhat uneven time-travel adventure. The book opens, like 2001, in the prehistoric forests of mankind's evolutionary origins. Soon, though, we're in 2037, aboard a UN helicopter policing remote regions of Afghanistan. The three occupants of the helicopter are thrown into history at the moment of a great Discontinuity. At that moment, the entire planet is instantaneously diced up into different moments in its past. From the viewpoint of the three cosmonauts returning from the International Space Station, we discover that different chunks of the planet now exist in different times. Most chunks are from periods in which the world was very poorly populated. The planet now is virtually empty of humanity. A small contingent of British soldiers from the mid 19th century survive in an Afghan outpost, so our UN helicopter crashes a hundred fifty years into its own past. The Soyuz space capsule, itself, lands at last in the midst of the Mongol armies of Ghengis Khan. The six survivors from the 21st century are apparently the most modern people to have lived through the Discontinuity. (Why are there no chunks of planet from the future?) Soon, they piece together their first steps on this new planet. Throughout, all events are watched by numberless small orbs of mysterious origin. These "eyes" seem to be both watching and controlling events on the time-shattered Earth. The key is that a radio signal is still being transmitted from the site of ancient Babylon. All our protagonists move in that direction, and there is where Alexander the Great will meet the Mongol horde. There are several false notes in the story, though the premise is absurd enough, like most time-travel tales, and dependent on some large coincidences. One of the cosmonauts is so megalomaniacal, that it is hard to imagine her being selected to go into space in the first place. She goes on to goad Ghengis Khan into fighting for control of this broken world. The authors have a small axe to grind, pointing out not too subtly that, after a great time catastrophe, mankind's first instinct is to fight over it. It is hard to be sure where one author leaves off and the other picks up, but it is clear that two different tales are interwoven here. The historical descriptions and battle scenes are vivid and often quite brutal. They contrast with the more elegant but obscure science fiction of the alien intervention into Earth's historical timeline. The finished book is uneven, but comes around a bit in the closing fifty pages or so. Its most vivid message, it seems, is that when thrust into a time before electricity or any other advanced technology, modern electronic tools of information are almost utterly useless. A clue, maybe, to our future as our own energy sources begin to be exhausted.
Book Two of A Time Odyssey
by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
This book, nominally a sequel to Time's Eye, is quite different from its predecessor, and seems to be steeped in the globally grim mood in the months and years since the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the terrible tsunami of 2004. On June 9, 2037, Bisesa Dutt, who was transported to the weird planet, patched together from bits of Earth in different historical times, is now returned to her London flat, just in time to experience the global disaster of a solar coronal mass ejection. The ejection of charged matter from the Sun causes massive power outages and various other accidents which leave the world, so dependent upon its technology, reeling. The characters refer to the event by its date, just as we refer to September 11 on a daily basis. Bisesa knows that this event is no accident, and that some long-lived aliens, responsible for her time traveling, have created an event designed to destroy life on Earth. Bisesa, however, is only a minor character in this novel. The people we read of are the scientists on the Moon who discover that June 9 is just a prelude to a massive solar event that will strike on April 20, 2042; an event that will sterilize Earth's biosphere. The book becomes an adventure of humankind's need to preserve itself. A massive shield is built and positioned near the L1 point between Earth and Sun, to shadow the planet from the Sun's coming storm. Overall, the technical, scientific, and even social aspects of this scientific community are convincing. Stephen Baxter, perhaps more than Arthur Clarke, definitely knows this milieu. The book is long on scientific details, though, outlining the vast technological achievements needed to save the world. The authors seem intent on integrating as many large technological visions and inventions as they can muster here, with space planes, space elevators, sun shields, Moon and Mars bases, artificial intelligence and climate manipulation. Mankind finally comes together in unprecedented ways, but the future remains uncertain, especially with the Firstborn planning their next move. The story, though, falls behind all these wondrous scientific details. There is much potential in a fiction about the end of the world that remains unexplored here. Carl Sagan's Contact made a somewhat more sincere effort at describing such a world. This book is relatively light, lighter even than its predecessor. But it is an entertainment. Recent great events appear throughout the book, though thinly veiled. And, that it takes place in the same "universe" as Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey is evident in the many references to that work and that world, including the intelligent computers, the bases on the Moon, and the meddling aliens (though this time malevolent).
Also by Arthur C. Clarke: [Childhood's End]