Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter

Sunstorm, the new sequel to 2004's entertaining Time's Eye, is a less focused, less satisfying book than its predecessor. Whereas Time's Eye was more of a counterfactual history novel than pure sci-fi, Sunstorm goes to the other extreme, inundating the reader with torrents of scientific jargon. That is fine, so long as there is some substance behind the science. But in Sunstorm, Clarke and Baxter (probably just Baxter, I don't think Clarke does much writing anymore) the tantalizing mysteries of Time's Eye are either dropped entirely or explained away with only a few short paragraphs. I expected much more.

The plot shows promise, even if it never fully delivers. In the year 2037, Earth is buffeted by an immense solar flare that fries electronics and disrupts wireless communications. The sunstorm is more of a nuisance than a threat, but soon an eccentric (is there any other kind?) genius discovers that an even bigger sunstorm is brewing, one that will vaporize the oceans, rip away Earth's atmosphere, and end all life on the planet. Humanity, led by the United States and the Eurasion Union (the authors are nothing if not optimistic), springs into action and contructs an enormous shield in space. The orbiting wall, acting as a sort of artificial eclipse, is designed to block the solar eruption. After five years of technological setbacks and triumphs, the earth is saved, though still severely damaged by the sunstorm.

More interesting, and frustratingly underdeveloped, is the source of the sun's suddenly erratic behavior. The same mysterious aliens who ripped up the fabric of time itself in Time's Eye are at work again; thousands of years ago, while mankind was constructing pyramids and other monuments to the sun, this alien race, called the Firstborn, eyed the upstart humans with suspicion and fear. From their solar system dozens of light-years away, the Firstborn launched a huge Jupiter-like planet straight into Sol, knowing that within two thousand years it would trigger a sunstorm that would exterminate the human virus that threatened to spread across the stars and consume precious resources.

Two mainstays of Clarke's work, dreamy-eyed humanism and overt hostility to religion, are once again prominent in Sunstorm. The story's characters can be broken up into three categories: powerful women, homosexual men, and religious fanatics. This is not so much offensive as amusing; in their heavy-handed effort to show their politically correct credentials, Clarke and Baxter have become caricatures of themselves. Normally, Clarke's deficiencies as a social commentator are more than made up by his ability to evoke a sense of wonder with huge, grandiose ideas. The lackluster Sunstorm does not meet that test.