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On June 9, 2037, a major solar event occurred. All across the planet Earth, people experienced electrical blackouts, communications outages, and all other manner of electronic disruption. At a monitoring station on the moon, a Russian scientist registered the event and he and his colleague began investigating the matter. The results of the study were at once astounding and terrifying. The electronic interruptions experienced on Earth were found to be merely a precursor to a more devastating event that was yet to come. The upcoming sunstorm would be so powerful that the entire planet would be sterilized. The date of the event was calculated to be April of 2042. The planet Earth, and the human race, had five years left to live.

A council of some of the top scientists on the planet is called, and the experts gather on the moon to discuss options. The best idea they can come up with is a gigantic space-ship, a generation ark, upon which Earth's legacy could be saved in hopes of finding a new planet to inhabit. That seems to be the best plan, until Earth's A.I., Aristotle, comes up with the idea of a shield.

The idea is accepted and work begins immediately. All the powerful nations of the Earth band together, with the exception of China, which seems to be working on some secret plan of its own. The moon base is quickly expanded with new manufacturing facilities so the components of the shield can be built and launched from the lower gravity, thereby saving time, energy, and money. The finished shield will have to be massive, nearly 13,000 kilometers wide, big enough to protect the entire planet from the majority of the solar energy, and they have less than five years to complete it.

But wait, there's more! Eugene Mangles, the most brilliant mind on the planet since Einstein, according to his colleagues, makes an even more disturbing discovery. Through his investigations, he has learned that the recent solar activity is no accident, but the result of a gigantic planet, fifteen times larger than Jupiter, crashing into the sun more than 2,000 years ago. Not only that, but by tracing the path of the rogue planet backwards, Eugene determines that this collision was no coincidence, the gas giant was deliberately launched at our sun from another star system. If Earth survives the sunstorm, it appears humanity will still have an impossibly powerful enemy to contend with.

Sunstorm is the second book in the Time Odyssey series by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. In book one, we learned of the First Born, a sentient race far more advanced than our own. Now the authors have revealed that First Born is an appropriate name for them since they were literally the first sentient race, born at the very dawn of our universe. Through a series of startling events, Clarke and Baxter show us that there are factions within the race of the First Born, one faction that apparently doesn't want to share the universe with another race, and another faction that disagrees with the first. This is kind of a secondary plot, but it really serves to increase the tension throughout the story.

Narrator John Lee does an adequate job, although he's not my favorite. His dialects sound pretty good, but there's not a lot of differentiation between characters. Also, I find that his voice can become monotonous at times making it hard to pay attention.

A Time Odyssey is turning out to be an exciting series of audiobooks. The main plot of each of the first two books was mildly interesting, but the sub-plot of the First Born has really caught my attention. Clarke and Baxter have one more book in the series, First Born, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Steven Brandt spends most of his waking hours listening to audiobooks and reviewing them for his blog, Audiobook Heaven. When not reading or reviewing, Steven is usually playing the saxophone for the entertainment and amusement of his family.