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rfmcdonaldI'm definitely on the record as wishing that there is as little life outside of Earth as is possible. The news of Mars' barrenness initially reassured me that complex organisms aren't necessarily likely to develop; news that there is likely an abundance of Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way has done the opposite. Why? I'd like to believe that humans are one of the galaxy's elder species, the others existing somewhere else, in the Galactic Center or the Norma and Cygnus Arm or some globular cluster orbiting far above the plane of the galaxy, far far away from our little Orion Arm. I'd be just as happy to believe that David Brin was right in predicting that most Earth-like worlds are oceanic worlds, incapable of producing the sorts of land-based species incapable of producing the complex technologies, like fire, necessary for spaceflight. Why? Just like H.G. Wells, I'm quite aware of the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines, or Canada's First Nations, or the Mapuche of Chile, or the Khoisan of western South Africa, or ...
That's why I was interested in reading A Time Odyssey, Sir Arthur C. Clarke's three-volume collaboration with Stephen Baxter, that and the fact that these three are the last of Clarke's novels published before his death. The series is what Clarke called an "orthoquel" to the themes of 2001, a revisiting of his themes of a great ubercivilization in particular his mysterious monoliths and od-like powers. Clarke's decision to choice Baxter as collaborator, Baxter having written (among other cheerful novels) the Xeelee Sequence in which successive challenges from increasingly powerful alien civilizations cruelly dominate humanity, should be enough to give the casual reader some idea as to the nature of the god-like civilization this time. Beginning with Time's Eye, and continuing with Sunstorm and Firstborn, humanity is faced with successive challenges. The series revolves around Bisesa Dutt, a British soldier on UN detail who is sucked into a bizarre alternate version of Earth, a slices of Earth built up from different snopshot slices of the world taken at different times in its recent history. (That's how Alexander the Great gets to fight the Mongols of Genghis Khan, for example.) Who did all this, and why? Well, that would be completely spoiling the series.
How are they? I quite enjoyed the novels' increasingly vast and complicated scope, intricately constructed piece by piece. On the other hand, people who want science fiction with non-unidimensional characters probably should look somewhere. I've always liked to think that Clarke's characters had a certain amount of dimensionality to them, but Baxter's? I'd never accuse that worthy idea-rich man of that. Chacun à son goût, I suppose.
That's why I was interested in reading A Time Odyssey, Sir Arthur C. Clarke's three-volume collaboration with Stephen Baxter, that and the fact that these three are the last of Clarke's novels published before his death. The series is what Clarke called an "orthoquel" to the themes of 2001, a revisiting of his themes of a great ubercivilization in particular his mysterious monoliths and od-like powers. Clarke's decision to choice Baxter as collaborator, Baxter having written (among other cheerful novels) the Xeelee Sequence in which successive challenges from increasingly powerful alien civilizations cruelly dominate humanity, should be enough to give the casual reader some idea as to the nature of the god-like civilization this time. Beginning with Time's Eye, and continuing with Sunstorm and Firstborn, humanity is faced with successive challenges. The series revolves around Bisesa Dutt, a British soldier on UN detail who is sucked into a bizarre alternate version of Earth, a slices of Earth built up from different snopshot slices of the world taken at different times in its recent history. (That's how Alexander the Great gets to fight the Mongols of Genghis Khan, for example.) Who did all this, and why? Well, that would be completely spoiling the series.
How are they? I quite enjoyed the novels' increasingly vast and complicated scope, intricately constructed piece by piece. On the other hand, people who want science fiction with non-unidimensional characters probably should look somewhere. I've always liked to think that Clarke's characters had a certain amount of dimensionality to them, but Baxter's? I'd never accuse that worthy idea-rich man of that. Chacun à son goût, I suppose.
