Rating: 
Summary: WHERES THE BEEF
Review: Shame on you Clarke for making us wade through 300 pages of fluff
,wheres the beef?....A good read but a big disappointment story wise..I am giving you and your publishing company 1 star for making avid readers like myself and others shell out $18 bucks for a novel that doesnt give you the meat until the last 10 pages and then pick ups in the next book..This predatory practice will make me start going to the local library for a free read, or use unsaviory practices to get a fee copy..You guys support us ,,,we will support you...Next time lets skip the appetizer and shoot for the entre
Rating: 
Summary: Unusual and exceptional collaboration
Review: The Earth has been carved up into a giant temporal jig-saw puzzle and put back together randomly by aliens called the Firstborns. These aliens were unknown to humanity until their watchdogs (or are they?) in the form of little silver orbs floating quietly above humanity. This forms the fascinating and promising premise of Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Time's Eye which is subtitled A Time Odyssey. While only time (pardon the pun) will tell if this is as important or thought provoking as Clarke's other Odyssey novels, this makes for a fascinating start. Clarke has finally found another collaborator up to the task of working with him. The only other novelist that would have been capable and could flesh out Clarke's characters was the late Mike McQuay. Baxter's a well known sf novelist and award winner in his own write (all these nasty puns just keep wanting to pop in for time). His novels Manifold: Time is an essential modern science fiction classic (and included in CD-ROM form with the book). The characters are pretty well developed (a problem for even Clarke's best novels)and the writing is about as sound from a science point of view as a tale like this could be. We'll have to wait for the other two novels in this series to be published before finding out what the real motives are behind the Firstborn. With Clarke and Baxter's well developed idea along with the deft characterizations make Time's Eye an important sf book from two of the best writers around.
Rating: 
Summary: Promising start to a new science fiction series.
Review: The earth has changed. Whether it has actually moved on or not is not known. Time has been taken from different periods in our earth's history and melded to create a new world that its few inhabitants are now beginning to call Mir. The environmental changes are only one factor to consider when it comes to survival. What would happen if say Alexander the Great met Genghis Khan?
A young journalist, Rudyard Kipling, is stationed at the New World frontier. He is one of the first to see the future people from 2037 come crashing down in their helicopter and to also one of the first to see one of the man-apes from the past. Mysterious satellites or other world cameras perhaps, have appeared all over this new world to perhaps record and observe how the land dwellers are dealing with their strange earth that is both old and new. The ones that have been left must band together to cross the earth and begin a new life. The first place they head to is Babylon.
The science fiction concept of paradoxes in this novel is handled with a very light hand. Spending time with your future self, for example, is not considered impossible. A generally accepted belief is that with messing with time's events, in effect making a new past, you will change future events and delete happenings, possibly preventing individuals from ever coming into being. Perhaps this aspect that will be dealt with a little more credibly in future novels of this new series. The combination of Clarke and Baxter, two legendary giants of science fiction has worked well to create an interesting new novel that promises many new adventures on a as yet unexplored new landscape - recreated earth. The possibilities "Time's Eye" presents would seem to be endless and are its strength as opposed to the somewhat flat characterization. A good start to a new series and a good run also for readers new to either author, but who would like to broaden their reading horizons a little.
Rating: 
Summary: yawn
Review: They must seriously be running out of good ideas for sci-fi, because the premiss of this book just sounds HORRIBLE! However, because I am a big Clarke fan, I wanted to read this novel. It was a mistake. The idea of taking different people from different time periods and making them interact with one another is just ridiculous for "hard" sci-fi. It seems to belong more to the science-fantasy realm. There is little character developement, but the epic battle scene near the end is well written and just flat out cool. As silly as the premiss is, it is written as well as it could have possibly been done.
Rating:
Summary: Great idea, so-so execution
Review: This novel mixes themes from both Clarke's and Baxter's prior work - ancient intelligences, harvesting mind, pre-humans. The device in this novel is the creation of an earth composed of a patchwork of different timelines spanning 2 million years of history, culminating in 2037. This sets up a world that allows exploration of the novelty of intersecting pieces from different timelines. The main plot centers around the events that lead to a battle between the armies Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, aided by a small group of 21st century people and a contingent of a 19th century British army. The main characters were well drawn, and I was felt that this world was real and interesting, mainly from the little details that are Baxter's trademark, especially the sense of smell. Despite my being a huge Clarke and Baxter fan, I came away feeling this was not the best collaboration, certainly weaker than the "light of other days", and the ending had a definite Deux ex Machina problem. Baxter seems to be writing so much these days that maybe he is being stretched a little thin. Overall this is an interesting read, but not up to the best that either author has written, with regards to theme and content. (I used to be a little cynical that Baxter collaborated with Clarke to get a career boost from such a distinguished author. But his talent as an author is now so obvious that I have to wonder whether it isn't Clarke who is getting most of the benefit now.)
Rating: 
Summary: A Mixup of Time
Review: Time's Eye is the first novel in A Time Odyssey series. In the North-west Frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan, four groups find themselves separated from their own times. Moreover, silvery globes fixed in mid air are scattered throughout the landscape, apparently observing local activity. In this novel, a UN surveillance helicopter in 2037 is fired upon by a Pastun adolescent, damaging the tail rotor. The pilot, Casey Othic, breaks his leg in the emergency landing, but the co-pilot, Abdikadir Omar, and the observer, Biseasa Dutt, are not injured. All the fluttering and smoke attract the attention of nearby soldiers, who think the contraption is a Russian machine. The soldiers are Tommies and sepoy troops from Jamrud, a fort in the English Raj of 1885. Included among them are two correspondents, the Anglo-Indian Ruddy and the American Josh White. They surround the smoking machine and order the occupants to surrender their weapons and exit the device. They have to help extricate Casey from the distorted frame. A British patrol also finds a pair of "man-apes" wandering the plains. The mother and child look very much like chimpanzees, but they have longer legs and a truly upright posture. The helicopter crew decide that they are australopithecines from at least two million years in the past. In low earth orbit, a Soyuz re-entry vehicle from 2037 is lost in time after launching from the International Space Station on a routine crew rotation. Musa, Kolya and Sable use their instruments to scan the planet, but can find only a few locations with signs of large populations. The capsule communications gear cannot detect any radio sources, but Sable uses a discarded amateur rig to locate two sources, one of which is the UN helicopter radio. In this story, the UN personnel share information with the Soyuz crew and determine that they are stranded in the thirteenth century. The British capture some scouts from an army translocated from 326 BC and send Biseasa and Abdikadir with some of the Raj troopers to make contact. The Soyuz crew land and find themselves among a Mongolian empire. This story is a well crafted tale of time dysfunctions and mixed histories, much like Dickson's Time Storm, but with a static timescape. It is also much like Stirling's Island in Time novels or Flint's Grantville series on a grander scale. However, it adds the omnipresent silvery spheres, which Biseasa senses are observation devices. She has gained an impression of a very old species, maybe from the earliest formed stars, which she names the Firstborn. Apparently these aliens have caused the time dysfunctions or, at least, are busily observing the phenomenon. Despite the hype, this novel does not present any new notions. Unlike Clarke's The Other Side of the Sky, it does not set a new standard for SF works. The only high-tech idea is the use of superstring theory to (vaguely) explain the time dysfunctions. The story does have a lot of name dropping, from Rudyard Kipling to Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, and even more use of famous locales. The Kipling inclusion is probably a tribute to a fellow SF writer, but the other contrived coincidences are rather tacky. Nonetheless, the story is well written and entertaining, the best joint work produced by these authors to date. Recommended for Clarke and Baxter fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of alternate history and castaways in time. -Arthur W. Jordin
Rating:
Summary: Good Beginning...
Review: Times Eye has some of the style of 2001, A Space Odyessy, but moves more slowly. It almost seems that these two great writers are having difficulty merging their styles. The book invites readers by seeming to offer a combination of Clarks Space Odyessy combined with Baxters Epic SciFi. It may turn out to be that when all the volumes have been written, but this first chapter is more alternate history than SciFi epic. I was definitely remined of Harry Turtledove when reading it. Now, I enjoy Turtledove's What If stories, so I enjoyed this book very much. I imagine a hard core SciFi fan might feel betrayed by the books sojourn into epic battles between Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, both aided by technology from 2037! Whatever these literary giants have in store for us in future volumes, this book is Alternate History. If you like Turtledove, you'll like this book. If you have no interest in Alternate History, pass!
Rating:
Summary: Not up to Clarke standards
Review: World wrecking is one of the most time-honored of genres in science fiction. In TIME'S EYE, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter posit a world that quite unexpectedly has been sliced and diced into various chunks and patched together in a quilt pattern that draws each slice from different times. The old earth is gone. In its place is a new planet whose newness does not stop at the surface. The refitting of the jagged edges of the crust extend clear down to the core. To their credit, Clarke and Baxter do not ignore the climatological and geological ramifications of such an overlapping earth. The planet is subject to the sort of superstorms that blast the earth in the recent film THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. Typical of such world wrecking stories, Clarke and Baxter use a multiple point of view. The tale begins with an early australopithecine hominid female and her child both of whom are snatched out of some impossibly long ago prehistory and planted in the middle of a 19th century Afghanistan fortress manned by British soldiers. Other transplanted time kidnap victims appear in quick succession: a Russian orbiting Soyez space station from 2037, a British/American helicopter crew from the same time, and the combined armies of Alexander the Great clashing with the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan. Clarke and Baxter do not offer their characters as fish out of water. Rather, they posit them as rational and intelligent beings who quickly grasp the "how" of their plight even if they do not know the "why." As the various characters interact with one another, they maintain their basic motivation as they try first to adjust to their situation, then to force this new world to adjust to them. Part of the joy of reading TIME'S EYE is that the authors do not offer a rationale for their splicing of the earth. Instead, they merely indicate that some long-lived extra-temporal entities have done so for their own purposes, leaving the stranded inhabitants to gasp at the arrogance of such creatures. TIME'S EYE is the first in what promises to be a series of repatched earth sagas, with each character adding his own unique perspective as he tries to comprehend the actions of these extra temporal entities. The style of writing does not flag. The characters and plot flow smoothly. Recommended.
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