And the First Shall Be Last

I finished reading First Born by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter months ago, but I’m just now getting to the review. It’s the third in the “A Time Odyssey” series. The reviews of the first and second books are available. I’ll ramble on about the third one below.

First Born starts decades after the end of Sunstorm. Humanity is reaching out to the planets and stars at a furious pace. The sunstorm demonstrated how fragile and easily extinguished we are when we exist on only one sphere around one star. Also the threat of an outside force bent on our termination, the Firstborn, drives cooperation among the tribes of man as never before seen.

Our colonizers on Mars have found something under the polar ice cap and detection nets places around the solar system have found another incoming object unlike anything they have ever seen. The incoming “bomb” from space reveals that humans weren’t the first to draw the attention of the Firstborn, and under Mars’ pole is the key to our survival. Heroes and heroines from the last books, joined by new names, must race to Mars, to Mir, and who knows where else, in order to save humanity. This book reaches across time, space, and universes to expand the understanding of the Firstborn.

This one is a worthy successor to the first two books. It expands the universe and provides much more explanation, though Baxter does leave the door standing wide open for another book. It does provide a good basic understanding of that the Firstborn are trying to do and what they have done in order to achieve it. I liked it.