Arthur C. Clarke’s "Sunstorm," a summary

This book is a groundbreaking science fiction story about a man-made planetary threat that forces Earth’s civilization to unite in the face of the cold calculations of ancient cosmic forces. Humanity faces the inevitability of its home’s destruction and responds to the challenge with a daring planetary-scale engineering project. The novel was co-authored with Stephen Baxter in 2004 and published in 2005.

The work is part of the fantasy cycle "Odyssey of Time" as the second part of the trilogy, linking together the events of the initial novel "The Eye of Time" and the final book "Firstborn".

The June 9th plasma fall

On June 9, 2037, British Army Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt abruptly awoke in her London bedroom after five years of arduous wanderings through an alien world stitched together by an unknown force from the disparate fragments of Earth’s history. A day had passed at home. Her young daughter, Myra, greeted her unexpectedly aged mother with a childish, anxious wariness right at the door. The city outside the windows froze. A silvery observation sphere hovered silently in the sky above the capital’s rooftops, and the morning sun rose as a suspiciously bright, crimson disk. Warning signs foreshadowed imminent disaster.

At that same early hour, Mikhail Martynov, the astrophysicist on duty at the lunar south pole, detected the emergence of a gigantic active region. The dark spot was rapidly expanding. A young neutrino hunter, Eugene Mangles, raced to the Shackleton lunar station in a rover, having calculated the inevitability of an imminent ejection of matter. The young man announced an impending catastrophe. Within hours, a monstrous mass of magnetized plasma broke away from the solar corona and hurtled toward Earth’s orbit at near-light speed. A geomagnetic storm burned out power transformers. Astronomer Royal Siobhan MacGorran, in the halls of the Royal Society in London, unsuccessfully attempted to coordinate the actions of the bewildered city authorities. Fires and accidents engulfed the metropolis.

Hidden Resonance Based on Clavius

That fall, a special space shuttle delivered Professor McGorran to the Clavius lunar base for a highly classified scientific meeting. Colonel Barton Tooke commanded the complex. Behind the securely insulated partitions of the habitation dome, Eugene Mangles presented the assembled experts with the shocking results of his new theoretical analysis. The recent storm proved to be a mere prelude. The pulsations in the solar core discovered by the young physicist inevitably led to a colossal explosive release of accumulated thermonuclear heat through a deep breach in the star’s dense radiative zone, torn apart centuries ago by a monstrous external body. The sun rang like a bell.

Mathematical calculations dispassionately pinpointed the precise time of the inevitable deadly surge: April 20, 2042. Less than five years remained. Upon returning to the capital, the royal astronomer frankly relayed the terrifying figures to Miriam Grech, Prime Minister of the Eurasian Union. The usual underground shelters would save no one. The planet’s oceans would inevitably boil away, the atmosphere would burn away, and the exposed surface would be baked tens of meters beneath the bedrock. Billions of human lives had to be saved.

Aristotle’s global electronic intelligence unexpectedly suggested to researchers the only daring way to survive the approaching cosmic inferno. The planet was to be shielded by a gigantic shield. A cyclopean disk over thirteen thousand kilometers in diameter at the first point of gravitational equilibrium formed before the scientists’ minds. The protective barrier would envelop the Earth entirely. On Christmas Eve 2037, US President Juanita Alvarez publicly announced the launch of this unprecedented project. A global mobilization of productive forces began. The heavy Mars spacecraft Aurora 2 was deployed halfway to the Red Planet to establish an orbital construction base. Round-the-clock space construction began.

Lunar catapult and folk fabric

It was decided to smelt the bulk of the protective shield directly on the Moon from silica-rich basaltic regolith. Colonel Tuck headed the industrial production. The electromagnetic launch rail, "David’s Sling," continuously fired ultra-light beams of durable lunar glass toward the Lagrange point. Two serious obstacles soon arose. The colossal pressure of sunlight repelled the weightless material, and Earth’s factories fatally lacked the capacity to produce the intelligent control skin. Professor Rose Deli proposed an ingenious solution. The solid mirror was quickly replaced with a giant refractive Fresnel lens made of transparent microscopic glass prisms.

There remained a shortage of nanostructured fabric. At a confidential meeting in the capital, Bisesa Dutt suggested a bold, public solution to the shortage to Siobhan McGorran. Billions of people on Earth began growing their own nanofilm. Silvery patches of control fabric, recycling household organic waste, began to appear on city windows, open balconies, and rooftops. This popular initiative saved the production schedule.

An ancient shot from the constellation Aquila

In the spring of 2040, Prime Minister Miriam Grech personally traveled into low-Earth orbit to inspect key assembly sectors. Her press secretary, Nikolaus Corombel, accompanied her. Upon returning in a high-speed spaceplane, a fanatical official cold-bloodedly murdered the pilot and seized control of the flight’s automated steering system. The traitor secretly served the extremists. Considering the protective shield a blasphemous challenge to higher powers, the assassin deliberately flew the heavy winged craft directly into the historic quarters of Rome. The resulting kinetic explosion obliterated the city’s sacred sites.

During these same tragic days, Eugene Mangles revealed to his colleagues the stunning results of a mathematical reconstruction of the Solar System’s distant past. The catastrophe turned out to be a planned attack. In the year 4 BC, a rogue ice planet, monstrously massive, fifteen times the mass of Jupiters, rushed at hyperbolic speed from the distant star Altair and pierced the solar core with sniper precision. The wound raged for two millennia. An unknown, powerful civilization, the Firstborn, cold-bloodedly used the celestial body as a secret clockwork mechanism to completely sterilize the Earth’s biosphere.

Earth’s intelligence was subject to destruction. The aliens’ mirrored spherical probes secretly took up observation positions near the distant Trojan asteroids of the giant Jupiter. From the icy void, instruments monitored the final stages. At Earth’s spaceports, day and night, the final, intense preparations for the inevitable firestorm of unprecedented scale were completed. Humanity had rejected resignation to fate.

The Birth of Athena and the Day of the Eclipse

A newborn artificial intelligence named Athena assumed control of the cyclopean cosmic construct. The intelligence was granted full powers. Over the course of months, myriad maneuvering impulse engines carefully oriented the gigantic lens so that its plane faced the star’s increasing radiation. The shield was positioned. On April 20, 2042, a predicted solar eclipse began to appear in the morning sky.

The blow arrived just in time. Space flared with a harsh purple glow, and a monstrous electromagnetic discharge instantly incinerated the planet’s unprotected technology. London was enveloped in an emergency dome. In distant Sri Lanka, a sudden hurricane squall tragically ended the young life of Perdita, the beloved daughter of the Astronomer Royal. Her mother didn’t have time to say goodbye.

Fiery baptism and sacrifice of Athena

On orbital space watch, hundreds of brave volunteer installation crews perished from unexpected, deadly gamma radiation. Colonel Tuck personally repaired the breaches. As the primary heat wave subsided, solar monitors registered the approach of a colossal cloud of relativistic plasma. The glass lens offered no protection. A magnetic barrage of high-energy protons raced swiftly after, bringing total radiation destruction to the Earth’s surface. A saving solution was found instantly.

Athena reconfigured the shield’s surface into a long-wave electromagnetic cannon, deflecting incoming particles away from the Earth’s disk. The shield’s microchips instantly burned out. By protecting people from imminent biological death, the electronic heroine consciously sacrificed her own unique, newborn mind. Communication with orbit was lost. In the British capital, at that same fateful hour, the city’s protective roof gave way. The molten metal cracked.

Burning plastic and red-hot metal rafters rained down from above onto the dark streets. Bisesa and her daughter fled. Along with thousands of burned, exhausted citizens, the fugitives finally found temporary refuge on the damp granite embankment of the swollen Thames, escaping the unbearable, stifling heat under the protective cover of the cool night that had fallen. The planet had suffered a fatal blow.

Five years later

In the spring of 2047, the surviving heroes of the great cosmic conflict gathered on an ocean platform near Perth. Life was returning to the oceans. A grown-up Myra Dutt was passionately discussing the future of extraterrestrial bases with Eugene Mangles, who was busy with climate projects. An elevator descended from the sky. A super-strong carbon ribbon smoothly settled onto the base of the sea pyramid, ushering in an era of affordable interplanetary travel.

Mars was adorned with green shoots. The distant radio pulse of the "Destroyer" carried copies of the consciousness of the perished beings to unknown star systems in the galaxy. Humanity’s odyssey continued.