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Informationen zum Autor Arthur C. Clarke is considered the greatest science fiction writer of all time and is an international treasure in many other ways, including the fact that an article by him in 1945 led to the invention of satellite technology. Books by Clarke—both fiction and nonfiction—have sold more than one hundred million copies in print worldwide. He lives in Sri Lanka. Stephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge and Southampton Universities. Baxter is the acclaimed author of the Manifold novels and Evolution . He is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award, the Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award. Klappentext "Wonderfully entertaining . . . a story that engrosses you with its dramatized ideas about the nature of existence . . . You won't set the book down either to eat or sleep or work if you can help it."-Chicago Tribune In an instant, Earth is carved up in time and reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly the world becomes a patchwork of eras, from prehistory to 2037, each with its own indigenous inhabitants. The explanation for this cataclysmic event may lie in the ancient city of Babylon, where two groups of refugees from 2037-three cosmonauts and three U.N. peacekeepers-have detected strange radio signals. The peacekeepers find allies in nineteenthcentury British troops and in the armies of Alexander the Great. The cosmonauts join forces with the Mongol horde led by Genghis Khan. Both sides set out for Babylon, vowing to win the race for knowledge-as a powerful and mysterious entity watches, waiting. Praise for Time's Eye "A rousing adventure."-The New York Times Book Review "By the end, when two of history's most ambitious conquerors meet, we are so thoroughly invested in the characters, we can't wait for the sequel."-Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) "A fast and engaging read."-Rocky Mountain News Chapter 1 Part 1 Discontinuity 1: Seeker For thirty million years the planet had cooled and dried, until, in the north, ice sheets gouged at the continents. The belt of forest that had once stretched across Africa and Eurasia, nearly continuous from the Atlantic coast to the Far East, had broken into dwindling pockets. The creatures who had once inhabited that timeless green had been forced to adapt, or move. Seeker's kind had done both. Her infant clinging to her chest, Seeker crouched in the shadows at the fringe of the scrap of forest. Her deep eyes, under their bony hood of brow, peered out into brightness. The land beyond the forest was a plain, drenched in light and heat. It was a place of terrible simplicity, where death came swiftly. But it was a place of opportunity. This place would one day be the border country between Pakistan and Afghanistan, called by some the North-West Frontier. Today, not far from the ragged fringe of the forest, an antelope carcass lay on the ground. The animal was not long dead-its wounds still oozed sticky blood-but the lions had already eaten their fill, and the other scavengers of the plain, the hyenas and the birds, had yet to discover it. Seeker stood upright, unfolding her long legs, and peered around. Seeker was an ape. Her body, thickly covered with dense black hair, was little more than a meter tall. Carrying little fat, her skin was slack. Her face was pulled forward into a muzzle, and her limbs were relics of an arboreal past: she had long arms, short legs. She looked very like a chimpanzee, in fact, but the split of her kind from those cousins of the deeper forest already lay some three million years in the past. Seeker stood comfortably upright, a true biped, her hips and pelvis more human than any chimp's. Seeker's kind were scavengers, and not particularly effective ones. ...
