ust last year we saw the release of the first book in this series, Time's Eye. In that volume a race of imponderable aliens named the Firstborn, their presence represented by omnipotent floating silver spheres, snatched a group of earthlings from the year 2037 and deposited them in an alternate dimension, where an assortment of other individuals from other eras had also been dumped. This alternate Earth, named Mir, was nearly the entire setting for the first book. But now we get to return to the original timeline and see what the Firstborn have lined up for the home planet. (This backstory is concisely conveyed in Chapter 11 of the new book.)
Our perspective on history this time around is threefold. First, we will see the world through the eyes of Bisesa Dutt, soldier. One of those exiled to Mir, she has been mysteriously brought back to Earth a mere day after her departure—even though five years have passed for her on Mir. Her teenage daughter Myra is highly disconcerted by the arrival of her confused and time-harshened mom. Our second batch of eyes belong to two scientists on the moon: Mikhail Martynov and Eugene Mangles. Concerned with monitoring "space weather," the two men have stumbled upon (in Mikhail's case) and actually predicted (in Eugene's case) some unusual solar activity that will have dire consequences for mankind. Lastly, we encounter events through the person of Siobhan McGorran, the United Kingdom's royal astronomer. Called in by the government to explicate the anomalous solar activity, Siobhan soon finds herself leading the emergency response to the events of June 9, 2037.
On that day, the sun erupted in a smallish storm that nonetheless wrought significant destruction and death on Earth. Humanity was congratulating itself on having dealt quite easily with the trouble when Eugene Mangles dropped his bombshell. This storm was mere precursor. In five years, a storm many orders of magnitude larger will occur, and all life on Earth will be wiped out. (Bisesa's contribution to this thread is to divulge her weird experiences to the authorities and try to convince them that the Firstborn are responsible for the attempted genocide.)
Given this warning, mankind has only one choice: to begin construction of the largest artifact ever created in space, a literal shield between the killer sun and its target, at one of the stable Lagrange points. Under the direction of Siobhan's lover, Bud Tooke, the project begins. Luckily, humanity has the help of two globe-spanning artificial intelligences: on Earth, Aristotle, and on the moon, Thales. In addition, the solar shield itself will be created with smart components, resulting in the birth of as third AI known as Athena.
It's a race against time now to erect the life-saving barrier. But will even a wall as big as a planet stop the secret forces that the Firstborn have layered into the sunstorm?
Pure Clarke comes through
Although I suspect that, given his relative youth and fitness, Stephen Baxter is doing all the heavy lifting in this series—i.e., the actual writing—this book is so rife with Clarkean themes and concepts that it reads quite like pure Clarke. Consider a few of the riffs. There's the monitoring and interference in human affairs by demiurgic aliens. There's the way in which humanity is seen as basically noble, able to transcend its petty bickerings in the face of great challenges, and the associated human ability to surprise overconfident aliens. There's the emphasis on space exploration as the next and necessary stage of evolution for mankind. There're not one but three HAL-like computer-based intelligences, but all good-natured this time around. There's the blunt poetry of physics and astronomy. There's a space elevator and moon bases and Mars bases, and even a Big Dumb Object. Sure, all these tropes are shared by others SF writers, but this exact mix is patented Clarke.
It's a good, engaging, entertaining, even enlightening mix, and has been so for 50 years. Baxter's contribution seems to be to update the specifics of it with the latest technological and theoretical underpinnings, and he does this well. Verisimilitude reigns, and there is never a moment when the reader is not convinced that this is how such a situation would actually play out.
But there are a couple of deficiencies that render the book a shade less invigorating than it could've been. The first is the imperfect use of the characters. Bisesa is basically thrown away after delivering her info about the Firstborn. Realistically, as a low-level soldier, her services are not needed by the high and mighty. But she could have been worked into the action a little more deeply. Then we have the fact that since everyone's in jeopardy, no one really is. With equal chances to die, something like the heroism of Bud Tooke or the Mars astronaut Helena White really doesn't stand out. Additionally, the cast is actually quite small. This is no Lucifer's Hammer (Niven and Pournelle, 1977), with dozens and dozens of points of view to spread out and enrich the drama.
Secondly, although sketched in vivid if hurried detail, the actual sunstorm and its effects on the Earth recall too closely the old-timey disasters of such works as Wylie and Balmer's When Worlds Collide (1933). Basically, the Earth is being cooked. Horrifying, but perhaps a little ho-hum after a century of armageddons. Any recomplicated, postmodern flavor to the apocalypse, such as we find in Robert Metzger's Cusp, is absent.
Still and all, the message being purveyed by Clarke and Baxter is one of old-fashioned hope, duty, courage, dedication and ingenuity in the face of a hostile universe where mankind must make his own meaning. And that never grows old.
