Baxter, Stephen (1957-)

Stephen Baxter, a British engineer and science fiction writer, collaborated with Sir Arthur C. Clarke on two novels in the series A Time Odyssey, which explores the nature of time. In the first novel, Time's Eye, powerful alien beings (the Firstborn) are experimenting with humans by taking different time slices from human history and creating a patchwork in which these various slices are loosely woven together. Cosmonauts and UN peacekeepers from the year 2037 are brought into contact with a British army unit from 1885 that includes Rudyard Kipling and later encounters Alexander the Great's army, which must confront Genghis Khan's horde. When the displacement first occurred, a temporal and a spatial shift occurred: The sun was at its zenith in 2037, and then it moves across the sky to a position of late afternoon; it was as if the process of time had altered its history. The various characters in the story are “castaways in time,” in a new world they call Mir.