While the book wasn't awful, while listening to it, I got the unshakable feeling that Baxter only wrote it to pay the bills. I've read a number of his short stories and love them. This is my first exposure to a novel by Stephen Baxter. As two great armies face off before the gates of Babylon, it watches, waiting.

Yet the real power is beyond human control, perhaps even human understanding. The two sides set out for Babylon, each determined to win the race for knowledge.and the power that lies within. The astronauts, crash-landed in the steppes of Asia, join forces with the Mongol horde led by Genghis Khan. The peacekeepers find allies in nineteenth-century British troops and in the armies of Alexander the Great. The answer may lie in the ancient city of Babylon, where two groups of refugees from 2037 - three cosmonauts returning to Earth from the International Space Station, and three United Nations peacekeepers on a mission in Afghanistan - have detected radio signals: the only such signals on the planet, apart from their own. Are these technologically advanced devices responsible for creating and sustaining the rifts in time? Are they cameras through which inscrutable alien eyes are watching? Or are they something stranger and more terrifying still? Scattered across the planet are floating silver orbs impervious to all weapons and impossible to communicate with. Instead, the world becomes a patchwork of eras, from prehistory to 2037, each with its own indigenous inhabitants. Suddenly the planet and every living thing on it no longer exist in a single timeline. In an instant, Earth is carved up and reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle. The Firstborn are unknown to humankind - until they act. For eons, Earth has been under observation by the Firstborn, beings almost as old as the universe itself.

Arthur c clarke stephen baxter