Blaze and Time’s Eye

Finished Time’s eye by Arthur C Clarke and and Blaze by Stephen King. Yeah I was reading both of them together and finished both within the last two days.

Time’s Eye was a total disappointment. I should have known better than to take it out in the first place since this is also one of Clarke’s collaborative works. I actually made a resolution not to read any of Clarke’s collaborative work after the bad experience with the Rama series. I think what’s happening is that Clarke is just lending his name to this recent work to boost book sales. This particular book has the name Stephan Baxter attached to it and I think the writing is all his.

Time’s Eye is based on a preposterous premises where the Earth is carved up into a jigsaw puzzle of different time lines from the pre-historic to 2037. The science part of SF stops there, the rest is a confused jumble of history and characteristics of historical personae through the author’s eye. These range from a quirky tilt-head glance of Alexander the great to the body odour of Gehghis Khan. And then it ends without any explanation at all why this happened. The synopsis on the jacket is totally misleading, it hints at a plot of a depth which the mergre imagination of the author is clearly not up to concocting.

Blaze is the latest by Stephen King and by the looks of it the last of the Bachman books. It’s a nicely written story centering on a kidnapping. The kidnapper is a victim of circumstances more than anything else. From the time that his father threw him down the stairs three times in a row, life has dealt a raw deal to Clayton Blaisdell, Jr. aka Blaze. He ends up being a dimwitted oaf that other criminals make a tool of, but the kidnapping makes the reader realize that under all that scar tissue Blaze harbors a sensitive soul. A soul maybe ripped in two by the damage his brain suffered but a sensitive one nevertheless. The story ends in the inevitable death of Blaze and doesn’t contain any of the twists and mind boggling surprises that King usually sets out for his readers. It’s a nice story but not an unconventional one as what we’ve come to expect from the master of horror fiction.