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Carol's Reviews > Time's Eye
Time's Eye (A Time Odyssey, #1)
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Here’s the thing. I absolute love Clarke’s works, I’ve read many things by him and they are usually a solid 4 star. I’ve also read Baxter in collaboration with Pratchett and that was also a very good series.
So what happened here?
I was truly expecting something amazing considering the authors, and I’m not going to deny the premise is actually amazing... but this took forever to make sense. We can have a disjointed Earth, but that doesn’t mean the plot also has to be disjointed, and it felt like it.
The beginning is amazing, you get the setup for three different times of human history and not long after there’s an even that fragments Earth and pieces it back together with parts from different times. So you have a planet made up of all possible time frames going back from the Neanderthals and going as far as 2037. Climate is going crazy, geography is a mess, and this apocalyptic event did wipe out most of the inhabitants, there’s very little people around.
But then... it’s 200 hundreds pages of seeing our 2037 crew, the 1850s soldiers and the army of Alexander the Great marching through a desolate Eurasia. And on the other side our Soyuz crew marching with violent Mongols, who all they do is kill anything they find.
***MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD***
It’s not until the last 100 pages that most of the action takes place, I thought the plot might be building up to something great but reality is a war happens and it ends very abruptly, and then we have a huge jump in time out of nowhere, we have more explorations, more emptiness, and very little of what is actually going on until you reach the last 50 pages.
I know that as a part of a trilogy I’m not supposed to have explanations on book one, but I wanted to see more of the emotional toll this shift in time takes on people. We only get tons of explanations on how cities seem abandoned, and how the weather is affecting plants and animals, and sometimes on how Alexander wants to build a new empire. But I wanted to see more how others reacted, other settlements, for them to approach the people they found along the way. It felt lacking on something, and it took me forever to read because I could never get invested in the story. There was never something pulling me to read.
The end however was good and confusing, we get a glimpse of this alien race, and I definitely want to know what happens, but I do have to say this is not a particularly strong opening to a trilogy.
So what happened here?
I was truly expecting something amazing considering the authors, and I’m not going to deny the premise is actually amazing... but this took forever to make sense. We can have a disjointed Earth, but that doesn’t mean the plot also has to be disjointed, and it felt like it.
The beginning is amazing, you get the setup for three different times of human history and not long after there’s an even that fragments Earth and pieces it back together with parts from different times. So you have a planet made up of all possible time frames going back from the Neanderthals and going as far as 2037. Climate is going crazy, geography is a mess, and this apocalyptic event did wipe out most of the inhabitants, there’s very little people around.
But then... it’s 200 hundreds pages of seeing our 2037 crew, the 1850s soldiers and the army of Alexander the Great marching through a desolate Eurasia. And on the other side our Soyuz crew marching with violent Mongols, who all they do is kill anything they find.
***MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD***
It’s not until the last 100 pages that most of the action takes place, I thought the plot might be building up to something great but reality is a war happens and it ends very abruptly, and then we have a huge jump in time out of nowhere, we have more explorations, more emptiness, and very little of what is actually going on until you reach the last 50 pages.
I know that as a part of a trilogy I’m not supposed to have explanations on book one, but I wanted to see more of the emotional toll this shift in time takes on people. We only get tons of explanations on how cities seem abandoned, and how the weather is affecting plants and animals, and sometimes on how Alexander wants to build a new empire. But I wanted to see more how others reacted, other settlements, for them to approach the people they found along the way. It felt lacking on something, and it took me forever to read because I could never get invested in the story. There was never something pulling me to read.
The end however was good and confusing, we get a glimpse of this alien race, and I definitely want to know what happens, but I do have to say this is not a particularly strong opening to a trilogy.
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