Written Thoughts

Where setting and plot are character

Clarke/Baxter’s Time’s Eye was a big disappointment.

There was a time when you couldn’t pull a Clarke book out of my hand. At my golden age of 10, I was always glomming on to one gem of his or another’s and in between my discoveries of his works, I’d go back to reread either Against the Fall of Night or the revised version, City & the Stars, again and again and again.

There’s a definite sense of wonder in Clarke’s work. Charlemagne, the alien of Night/Stars, pulled thousands of years of humanity’s trials and errors into perspective for me, a wee lass at the time. The explorers of the Rama series looked beyond the failed qualities of humanity to explore what’s next. And now, with this new series, A Time Odyssey - yep, that’s right, Time’s Eye is just book one in a series - Clarke and Baxter use a historical melting pot of humanity’s key eras to explore the absurdity of Homo sapiens and war through a battle between Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great.

And oddly, or rather not so oddly, I am left cold and bored.

I know that Clarke had very little to do with writing this book due to health reasons, so while he may have provided Baxter some direction for his efforts, the ‘wonder’ I’m used to experiencing when reading something of Arthur’s is gone. This tome is stale, predictable and anything but wonderous. I’m not familiar with Baxter’s work so I have no way of really telling who contributed what, but I can take a stab at guessing that other than the broad points of the story, the inner workings are all Baxter’s.

Instead, we’re taken on a long winded history lesson of Alexander’s reign, Khan’s barbaric plunder, 19^th century British troops ramrod India, 21^st century Middle Eastern politics and Russia’s efforts to keep the outdated Soyuz flying even as the Americans can’t get their own shuttle back in the air. All to lay some sort of groundwork with the reader as to what is good versus what is bad about humanity.

I can’t help but think of that line from the West Wing episode We Killed Yamamoto (referring to the US covert operation to kill Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor)...

Leo: We spent millions of dollars developing a pen for the astronauts that would work in zero gravity. Know what the Russians did?

Toby: Used a pencil?

So yes, Alexander was a philosopher-king. And Khan was a brutal rapist pig. And the Russians make a better pencil. But who cares? We, or at least most of us, know these things already.

I might have cared. I might have gotten caught up in this story IF the characters had. But they didn’t. They walked through the stories, POV jumping all over the place (there is no way a new author would get away with this!), and we are never allowed inside. We’re never allowed to care about them. They’re just cardboard cut outs that walk through the story.

Time’s Eye is predominately done in an omniscient POV - case in point, the scenes with Seeker, an Australopithecus, an ancestor of man. We’re supposed to be in her POV but there’s this heavy history lesson about the millions and millions of years it took for the Earth to form and become a viable planet.

The entire book is like this. You’ll get a few lines of dialogue, then it’ll go into a history lesson, then a few lines of dialogue, then more history.

If the characters knew this stuff and we got into their motives and attitudes about it, I’d be happy. But the writer(s)’s stamp is all over this book and well, quite frankly, I learned this stuff over 20 years ago -- I didn’t need another round of it here.

Heavy on setting (and some it IS wonderful - their description of ancient Babylon is fascinating), light on character, this book is antithetical to what I’m attempting to do with Critical Past. Though I know I need to beef up my settings in rewrite, my ‘mission’ is to show how the past was important to our future through the characters. The ancients and the moderns. I want Jon, Kate, Burke, etc (and therefore the readers!) to feel the implications of each step taken in history and how it will echo through the halls of time.

SIDEBAR: A few side notes of frustration

There are a few minor similarities between Time’s Eye and Critical Past that I need to mention. Nothing huge, just little things:

+Heron is mentioned, using Hero with the N at the end. It’s just one paragraph discussing an invention of his that they cobble together.

+The 19^th century Brits teach Alexander’s troops how to use stirrups - something I planned on delving into in more detail in my rewrite (i.e. the Jon and Cadeyrn scene on the road to the Iceni)

+After the “Discontinuity” = which Clarke/Baxter’s name for the change (I just use “the accident” - I wonder if I need to come up with something more ‘poetic’), one of the Cosmonauts looks down on Earth from space in a manner similar to when Jon looks at the moon and its missing colony. But I wrote this scene months and months ago - I ain’t changing it! In fact, in rewrite, I intend to do more with the holo image experience he has.

Am I glad I read Time’s Eye - yes. But here’s the acid test: Will I reread it? No, thank you.

posted by No One You Know @ 8:38 AM