Great collaborative work ( )

I read this book for my SciFi bookclub. After the last two choices, this was excellent. Unfortunately, after the last two choice, a cereal packet would be excellent.

It really felt like the authors wanted to write a book about Ghengis Khan and Alexander the Great having a fight and then built everything else around it. This means there's a lot of scaffolding for just one chapter.

Communication/translation problems seemed far too easily surmounted especially when they started going into scientific concepts.

And "pi = 3" grrrr... No. Just, No. ( )

Finished Time's Eye for my RL SF book group. It was not bad, but not amazing either. It was about a time distortion event on earth in the year 2037. The earth ended up like a giant pizza with tip rips so that different time periods ended up next to each other. The time rip brought the physical place with it. Different ages, climates, flora and fauna all patched together.

Not many people made it, but there are a few moderns, proto-humans, the British Raj in a fort on the Northwest frontier ala 1880, complete with Rudyard Kipling, and the biggies, Alexander (just after he has taken the arrow in the chest in India) and his army and Genghis Khan and his army.

Yes, it appears the whole point was to have Alex and Genghis have a big ole' battle. Ogg.

There are mysterious alien artifacts, 'Eyes' that hover and observe all.

The book was written by both Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The writing isn't bad, and the story flows, but it is very much a summary type of book with occasional character input. It has to be to cover all the viewpoints, but that style for me, detracts from the characters, and the story. I am not gripped to find out what happens next.

It is the first of a series, yet the buzz is that they can be read as stand-alones. Apparently one of the characters from the time ripped earth goes back to the time and world she came from in the next book. Don't think I will join the party.

Really enjoyed the authors having the Macedonians searching Greece for Thebes though.

I wished they had spent more time thinking or talking about whether they were the victims or the survivors of the event. Was their distorted earth the cripple, with a normal untouched earth somewhere in time ? Was the normal earth destroyed, and they were the survivors ? Was there a mirror image of their damaged earth, which absorbed the missing time/earth sections that were replaced by the time rips ?

Either that or spend more time with the characters. There is a similar if smaller scale book about a group of teens on a vacation in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, and dinosaurs start running through the landscape. It is called Footprints of Thunder by James F. David, and I much prefer it, to this latest entry. ( )

good airplane read.. i liked the inclusion of superstring theory, but it was a little heavy on the 'grasping to put together an awesome battle between genghis kahn and alexander the great'. but i guess, boys will be boys and it was a fun and fanciful read with a lot of involved characters (i like that so it's good) ( )

Written from many viewpoints, this book is a little hard to get into until most of the viewpoints, ranging across different time periods and locations, converged. There was a little too much-I'm not sure but I guess realistic cruelty but then again who am I to judge that. The eyes were a neat idea but I do not think the idea of a more advanced race watching humans was fully developed. ( )