The sequel to Time's Eye was pretty dissapointing in all it's aspects. While Time's Eye had an interesting concept at it's core, Sunstorm has a fairly standard disaster plot - the sun is going to go blooey and wipe out life on earth. The cause of this potential disaster are laughably ridiculous and the solution to the problem is completely predicatable. Bubbling underneath the dumb B-movie disaster plot are some vaguely interesting ideas and sf concepts, but no effort is ever really put in to developing them. The characters are straight out of the cliche pile and I can't think of a single time in the book I was surprised by anything. I guess it's an ok b-movie style disaster story, but I expect much better from these authors. ( )

A great read and an interesting sequel to Time's Eye. In this book, the Firstborn have arranged the destruction of the Earth via massive solar events, and our heroes must engage in mammoth feats of terrestrial and solar engineering in order to save humanity.
As ever with Clarke and Baxter the story is gripping and bristling with scientific ideas. Unfortunately, as has become common with Clarke's work, there is also a distasteful and wholly unnecessary anti-religious (and in particualr anti-Christianity) theme. In this book religion is "explained" as a mere side effect of electromagnetic interference that has in some way corrupted poor unfortunates' brains, and the advent and rise of Christianity as side-effects of the Firstborn's actions (although since this is clearly an alternate universe to our own, one wonders exactly what the point of this digression was). Someone should tell Mr Clarke that it is not religion per se that is responsible for all the worlds ills, but intolerance - and that it is something that all humans can suffer from, not just the religious. ( )

Sequel novel to _Time's Eye_ and the sterling duo's (Clarke and Baxter's) third collaboration overall. Just terrific.

My opinion of this book might be different if it weren't supposed to be a sequel. Viewed as a stand-alone novel (which it almost is anyway), it's a well done hard sf end-of-the-world thriller. It was very heavy on the science and light on the character development, but nevertheless Clarke and Baxter managed to create a story which kept me turning the page with some excitement until the end.

The problem with this novel is that as a sequel, it's deeply lacking. Sunstorm begins exactly where Time's Eye left off. Bisesa is returned from her odyssey on the fractured time alternate Earth of Mir, to the London of 2037. Unfortunately, this is nearly the sole point of intersection with Time's Eye. Sunstorm is not so much a sequel as it is a stand alone story with a shared title.

I had been intrigued by the premise of Time's Eye. It was a unique twist on your usual time travel story, where an alternate Earth was created that was a mishmash of different historical Eras.

Sadly this premise was almost entirely abandoned here in favor of a far more conventional (and less interesting) setting, London in 2037. Rather than a tightly interwoven plotline expanding on and explaining the mysteries of the first novel, what we're given is a completely new story with little relationship to that novel, aside from a few borrowed plot elements. Time isn't even a plot element in this one - it would fit far better as another "space oddysey" novel than a "time oddysey" one.

The strange event that was the formation of the alternate Earth and the mystery of how and why Bisesa was returned from it was never satisfactorily explained. What explanation we're given for the behavior the aliens responsible for both novel's plots feels weak, as it doesn't seem logically consistent.

I can't imagine that this is the conclusion that Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter envisioned when they created the "Time Oddysey" series - what may have happened to the original vision, however, I can't begin to guess. ( )