Ark (Flood, #2) By Stephen Baxter

Lori L (She Treads Softly)

Ark by Stephen Baxter returns to the Earth as seen in Flood. It's a sequel but at the beginning events from both novels are running concurrently, just in different locations and following different people. Ark follows project Nimrod, or Ark 1. This ark, however, is a spaceship. The story follows the project from the early days when Ark 1 is being developed and young candidates for the crew are being trained, to the flight and subsequent problems that emerge in the flight to Earth 2. Baxter mainly follows three different women: Holle, Venus and Grace.

I enjoyed Flood quite a bit, so I was pleasantly surprised that Ark surpassed it in some ways. Baxter does an excellent job of moving the story forward and developing his characters through dialogue. He covers the science and the sociological aspects that a program like Nimrod would encounter. Baxter deals with some dark, harsh realities that an elite program in a world in crisis, as well as a long space flight, would face. This makes his work eminently readable.

Even though I would imagine that you could read Ark as a stand alone novel, I would suggest reading Flood first, and then Ark. Flood explains some background details. The science isn't daunting either, so if you normally avoid hard science fiction for that reason, Baxter makes it easy to enjoy his novels. It has been a trying couple of weeks, including being forced to wait to finish Ark right after I started it due to other pressing circumstance.

Very Highly Recommended;
http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/

Lydia

Ark, like Flood, takes a long time to get off the ground (heh heh). I found myself saying "yeah, yeah, enough with the Earth logistics already!" It was frustrating the buildup to the launch was half the book, because I'd felt that the Earth story had been told in Flood. There were some good ideas here, and enough to keep me interested, but I'm frustrated by all the unexplored stories that Baxter sets up. He makes a fair go at building the characters, but I still found them pretty flat. He does this funny thing where he'll dispassionately dispatch the characters, often with one character saying in a later seen "it's a shame that so-and-so was killed by that food poisoning". And then he'll move on to something else. I found that there was so emotional impact when characters died, it was all just mildly depressing throughout. (spoilers below)
Although the main characters in Ark are female, Baxter can't help but keep the old trope of "she's ambitious...therefore unfeeling and ruthless" as applied to Kelly's leadership. Kelly's other character flaw was leaving her child on Earth (albeit with her partner and father), which makes her a bad mother/cold hearted bitch. Many other characters, particularly the male ones, leave their children behind, but they are portrayed as victims of circumstance. Liu Zheng, for example, could have stayed with his wife and child in China but chose not to. The other female characters seem quite weak. I was appalled that Venus and Holle, supposed "strong women" , had tolerated chronic sexual abuse on board the ship for years, barely trying to fix the situation. They both seemed passive and detached to me. Baxter also sets up Grace's character as being central, then does nothing with her at all.

I was hoping that Baxter would explore the actual re-building of civilization (like in the book Red Mars), but he never gets there. Instead, this book mostly describes what happens to a crew of emotionally retarded brats who are suffocated by stale farts and rivalry. It seems that they never really grow up, except in their capacity to hurt each other. I found no hope in this book. That doesn't make it a bad book, but it does become a bit of a slog to read. I would be interested in a third book though, because this one left me damn unsatisfied.

Cécile

A hard science book that has a lot of very interesting ideas to toss around, but fails somewhat on the "soft" (but no less important) science front.

The nuts-and-bolts details were fascinating. I'm not a scientist, so I have no idea how realistic they are (though let's face it, probably no one has--if we could say for certain it's realistic, we'd be building the thing already!), but they certainly were thought-provoking. And Baxter did succeed in creating a deeply unsettling sense of loss, of dizzying distance, of sacrifice. Much of the story made me quite uneasy, in fact, because of how well he rendered the claustrophobia of a group of people who might well be the last humans alive but will never know for sure, and the sense of irrevocability of a setting where any separation is for life, and any distance travelled won't be travelled back. On this, the book is a success.

Where I think Baxter failed, on the other hand, is in the description of the human element. While the astronauts on the Ark spent their whole life training for the mission, the society they form is surprisingly traditionalist. The crew members seem to be completely unprepared to deal with would-be dictators or rapists, and they reproduce a patriarchal model without question, as though the author was trying to tell us that it's the only model that could work. I was very surprised that after all the work that went into imagining the technical details, the social issues were solved in such a simplistic way, and Baxter took absolutely no time at all to imagine how an original society might emerge in the conditions of the Ark.

Last problem is literary. The pace takes forever to pick up. While isolated scenes work well to describe life in space, they also give a sense that nothing important ever happens, and that there's no real evolution in the situation. As a result, I read willingly, but put down the book just as willingly after a few pages. Only the last hundred pages or so have actual rhythm. The point of view keeps shinfting between one character and another, but they all mostly sound the same, and they're so unevenly distributed iit sounds like the changes are purely perfunctory. The names of the protagonists have simplistic symbolisms (just read and you'll see what I mean), and that adds to the overall lack of depth of the characters. In a story where the technical aspect is emphasised and the human element is already a weak point, it's a bit unfortunate.

In short: good ideas, thought-provoking concepts, but not taken far enough, in my mind.

Bill

Ark is a continuation of Baxter's apocalyptic
Flood and tells the story of Ark 1 being built somewhere near Denver Colorado in the barely surviving USA, its launch and the struggles of its passengers as Ark 1 tries to save a small remnant of humans from extinction. Baxter tells for me what is a believable hard Sci-Fi story of multigenerational life in a container as its passengers hurtle towards salvation: good story, well developed characters.

It was coincidental and very fortunate that I had just read
When Worlds Collide and
After Worlds Collide, another hard Sci-Fi duology written in 1933-34. These are essentially the same stories with different Humanity shattering disasters, different emphases, styles and tones due to the different eras during which their authors lived. EG, the main characters, the heroes in
When Worlds Collide are several men and 1 women. In Baxter's work they are all female, underscoring the new-wave sexism of the 21st century. Both works include Biblical quotes. The older uses these to give hope and courage from a God as savior point of view. The newer uses these to affirm that Man is on his own in an uncaring universe. Finally from today's point of view, the Science in
When Worlds Collide seems right on, whereas Baxter's science, while not obviously breaking any of our current Scientific Laws, uses highly speculative theories to tell his story. I find it interesting that both works use the same method of propulsion to get their respective Arks off the Earth.

Overall I quite enjoyed Ark and am glad I did not have to wait very long for it to be published after reading Flood (though I did have to buy the UK edition, since the US edition is not yet announced). Flood/Ark should have been published as 1 book; it should be read as one book; it should be reviewed as one book. Gollanz hardbacks, expensive in the US, even compared to other UK publishers, are, IMO, cheaply made. Nice covers, though, and that on Ark quotes another great '50's Sci-Fi movie.

Benjamin

Depressing and brilliant. Heavy spoilers follow.

The sequel to Flood is better than its predecessor. It begins with much the same feel of the first book, in that it follows a sheltered and more-or-less naive group of special, selected few, but Ark puts a lot more stress on the brutality necessary to protect their pocket of safety. It is clear that these are the best humanity has to offer, and it is clear that nothing, including morality, can be allowed to interfere with their mission. This is well-trod ground from the first book, and, standing alone, would be inferior to the earlier exposition. But all the sacrifices that were made and all the heavy necessity of the Ark's mission make the crew's subsequent descent into pettiness and barbarity all the more striking.

By the end of the book, there are at least five viable human societies (rafts, submersibles, Earth II, Earth III, and Halivah) scattered around the galaxy, but all of them ride such a razor-thin line separating them from extinction that it is hard to feel any optimism. Throw in the base selfishness that split the space crew in the first place, and humanity's destruction is all but assured. And then, just to twist the knife, the book's last sentence shows the stranded Earth III settlers abandoned as the crippled Halivah, without even waiting for the settlers to finish disembarking, sets off into the unknown.

Depressingly brilliant.

my favorite quote: "'I have no stake in the future. But the present is rich enough for me.'"

Nicholas Whyte

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1392239.html

This is the second book in a series; its predecessor, Flood, which I haven't read, saw the near-future Earth threatened by catastrophically rising sea levels, and Ark follows the story of a group of young survivors sent to colonise a distant planet in order to continue the human race. I will look out for Flood but didn't especially feel the lack of having read it hampering my enjoyment (it is fairly easy to spot which characters must have been in the previous book). I did, however, feel that Ark is weakened as a novel by the number of loose ends left unresolved, in particular the characters and groups of characters who drop out of the narrative, fate unknown, some of whom will presumably to be brought back again (or definitively killed off) in future volumes. And in general, while Baxter's writing always at least teeters on the brink of greatness, this doesn't quite make it. The basic idea is a great sensawunda concept - the broad brush strokes of the mechanics of building the Ark, and the human factors which screw up its makers' plans, are depicted in full glory. But at a human level Baxter's characters don't always sound like, say, 22-year-old women thrust into leadership positions; and they sometimes make peculiar choices which enable him to extend the narrative in the direction he wants. The book becomes more episodic towards the end, and I felt Baxter was rather rushing to finish it. So I wasn't completely satisfied.

Tomislav

This was published in 2009, and nominated for both the Locus and the British SF Association Award in 2010, but did not win.

I had previously read Baxter's Flood (2008) a couple of years ago, and while this is a spin-off, a story based on the same events, it is not a direct sequel. Even so, I would recommend reading Flood first.

My main complaint with Flood was the scientific implausibility of the main speculative concept - the release of so much water from the mantle of the Earth so as to slowly and eventually submerge all land. It's never made clear whether that is caused by human action, or is just an unprecedented geological event. And also that the drawn out loss of one famous place after another by the same mechanism got repetitious. In Ark, Baxter gives enough of that to give a flavor for what is going on, but doesn't fill the whole book with it. The story moves on to the action of rocket launch and then to space-based events. The project of the survival of humanity progresses and sometimes things fall apart in interesting ways, making this a better read than Flood.

I think the plausibility gets stretched a little thin by the end, and the final settings just don't seem like sustainable set-ups for survival to me. Maybe it's intended to be a very dark read with pessimistic outcome, or maybe it's just the groundwork for a next book. It has been 4 years without a sequel so far.

Patricia Scholes

After reading Flood, and not caring for it, I read Ark with reservation. It was a good read, mostly, but like the first book it had some problems. I don't think people are as adaptable as Baxter insists. It's as if he believes in one generation we can evolve to meet any environment. I take the opposite view, that we were specifically designed for THIS environment, and the worlds found had too many issues for our life to thrive. Furthermore, who got the seeds? That question was never answered.

Another problem I found was a host of children who completely disregard their parents, and you have parents barely involved with their children. He did this in Flood as well. Since I work with at-risk children, I take a completely different view. We (adults) take an active role in caring for and shaping our children. We do not let them run wild in packs, or bad things WILL happen.

This book didn't work for me.

Jordan Anderson

Although far more scientifically “dense” and a bit harder to understand than Flood, Ark is not only a worthy successor to that book, but, still, after a second read, nearly 11 years later, remains one of my favorite books, and easily one of the best I have ever read.

My review of Flood (and, to a lesser extent Moonseed) details just why this book, and Stephen Baxter, is so good. I won’t go into it for fear of repeating myself 3 times, but basically, it’s that, in a world of unrealistic and fanciful, hard to understand sci-fi, Stephen Baxter gets it. His books (at least the more “hard” sci-fo, reality based ones) make sense and are scarily plausible.

This series also highlighted the sheer desperation and destruction and human drama that would unfold in such dire situations. Furthermore, Baxter is a pro and detailing the resilience of mankind and our desire to succeed.

Celia Sánchez

Continuation of Baxter's apocalyptic Flood
Floodand tells the story of Ark 1 being built somewhere near Denver Colorado in the barely surviving USA, its launch and the struggles of its passengers as Ark 1 tries to save a small remnant of humans from extinction..The basic takeaway is that no matter how far we travel in the universe, we'll still be taking human beings with us, with all of our strengths and flaws. Humans are selfish, and deeply altruistic. We are violent and peaceful.

Interesting concept. A little too much technical engineering jargon for me but overall an interesting story

Sara

Spoilers below...

Like Flood, Ark is a page turner with some interesting science and some very flat characterization. Expected that, but by the half point, these characters are making such stupid and improbable decisions -- deciding to spend seven years flying back to a flooded out earth after seven years in space, and splitting up their valuable resources three ways -- that whatever suspension of disbelief is required to get them off the ground, is gone. Oh so gone.
And...Baxter's turning the "illegals"(with the exception of a military officer who is forced onto the ship) into sleazy layabouts just comes off as bad, right wing metaphor.

Nick

Exceptional followup to
Flood, hard SF with deeply researched background on long-term space travel. Somewhat of a retread or rework of 'generational travel', e.g.
And All the Stars a Stage. It's 5 stars because of the author's ability to pull me into an updated view of 'Fermi's Paradox'.

Highly recommended (read Flood first, though).

edifanob

Even with a slow begin a great read. You should read this before you go on an interstellar flight.

Read
my review

Donovan

I love a good science fiction story that contains a lot of 'Hard Science' than can be researched independently of the novel and Ark contains heaps of it. Next to the characters themselves, I found the hard-science one of the most tantalising aspects of Ark.
One think I will say in regards to Ark is that I seriously recommend you read Baxter's initial novel for this series called 'Flood'. There are elements that some readers may find difficult to understand without that background. In saying that, Baxter has been quite good with providing enough information that you should be able to work out what has happened if you engage this as a stand-alone read.
The characters are so well developed and one in particular makes you wonder if Baxter actually knows someone with that character's peculiar flaw. Their interactions and the social predictions that are made give this novel a good gritty realistic feel to it.
The only disappointment I have with Ark is only mild - it is left open ended. I have not been able to find out if there is going to be any further novels to the series but I can hope.
This is up there as a Science Fiction Masterpiece.

Plot ***Spoilers***
Readers are initially introduced to the principal characters in a flashback to 2031. At this time, the rising sea levels have inundated most of the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America and the flood waters have risen as far north as Kentucky, causing a considerable influx of internally displaced persons ("eye-dees" is a derogatory term used to describe them). For the moment, Denver and most of Colorado are safe from harm, and has become the new capital of a drowning United States. Although civil war is brewing with separatist Utah over control of untainted fresh water supplies and former Interstate Highway System roads. With the future of humanity uncertain, affluent inhabitants of the United States and remaining elements of NASA have funded a desperate and far-fetched get-away plan called 'Nimrod'; to ensure the continued survival of the human race, they construct a massive interstellar spacecraft from conjoined and modified Ares rockets, Saturn hardware, and Space shuttle components that is capable of superluminal travel, and is christened as 'Ark One' under the sponsorship of the most wealthy. The plan is that the children and descendants of those who built the ship will travel to a neighboring earth-like exosolar planet to start civilization anew, given that shortly before the onset of the Flood, SETI technology had advanced to the point where it could detect potentially habitable worlds in other planetary systems.

The main character, Holle Groundwater, is the daughter of one affluent man, Patrick, who were first introduced to the project by Jerzy Glemp, a former Polish millionaire; his shy but intellectually gifted son, Zane, becomes Holly's best friend as he helps her progress through the project's elite scientific education program to become a candidate for one of the ship's many specific functions each person must contribute, with her specializing in spacecraft life support and Zane as the Ark's warp drive specialist. Other candidates are introduced and excluded due to the brutal training regime of the project, for the candidates in question are required to have specialized fields of knowledge for either the ship's function and/or for preservation of mankind's history, knowledge, and culture; and to create a secular-minded crew with a diverse gene pool to breed. Kelly Kenzie becomes the designated mission leader during the first phases of the mission, Wilson Argent is her sometime partner who succeeds her as mission commander later in the book; and with Venus Jenning is the Ark's celestial navigator. As noted above, there is some overlap between the earlier novel in this trilogy and its successor - aging astronaut Gordo Alonzo and Thandie Jones, the bisexual oceanographer from Flood, appear as influential characters, and Grace Gray is also a pivotal character, as is her daughter Helen, who is born on the Ark en route to its initial interstellar destination.

During the 2030s, President Linda Vasquez serves four terms of office under the crisis conditions and the remnants of the federal government and armed forces take over control of the Nimrod Project. During that time, experimental use of antimatter propulsion results in several tragedies and triumphs, all the while the floodwaters rise inexorably. By 2041, the Ark is ready to be launched, although a relentless selection process has reduced the number of potential candidates to eighty in number. On the day of the launch, desperate civilians and military personnel escaping the approaching floodwaters attempt to storm the Ark, resulting in a hurried evacuation of the candidates to the starship in question. The chaotic launch is successful, but causes fatal irradiation of the surrounding area, owing to the use of nuclear fission– powered thruster technology (derived from Project Orion (nuclear propulsion) of the 1960s).

Once the Ark has left Earth orbit to get under way, the crew find that they have inadvertently left some prior designated candidates behind, and some of the security personnel make a failed attempt at mutiny to find a new life shipboard. In addition, some of the female candidates are pregnant and give birth to children who become a shipboard generation. By 2042, they have harvested enough antimatter from Jupiter's magnetosphere to propel their warp drive starship to 82 Eridani's planetary system, twenty-one light-years from the Sol System, which is reached nine years later. By that time, most of Earth now lies underwater and Mount Everest is calculated to become submerged in 2052.

However, problems arise, due to the nature of the targeted planet, designated "Earth II." Although 82 Eridani is a yellow G5 star, it turns out that the 'earthlike' world in question is on the fringe of its planetary system ecosphere and the prospects of prolonged extremes of temperature are further worsened by a high axial tilt relative to the system's ecliptic (rather like that of Uranus in our own solar system). (This planetary configuration, called "Urania", is used by Baxter in his story "Grey Earth". It is ultimately derived from a book called What If the Moon Didn't Exist?.) There is debate and in-fighting over what to do next, but the crew come to an agreement as Zane proposes to split the ship and crew up. One colonizes Earth II, while another led by Kelly travels back to Earth in one of Ark One's twin hulls, Seba, making planetfall in 2059.

A third faction with Holly, Wilson, Grace, Venus, and Zane takes the ship's other hull, Halivah, and takes a further thirty years to travel outward to an (unnamed) M6 red dwarf star and its super-earth terrestrial world, designated "Earth III" and situated 111 light years from Earth, within Lepus (constellation). Unfortunately, generational tensions arise between the rebellious youth born on the ship and the original crew, with Wilson forming a gang-like leadership breeding with the majority of the females on board. Things are further worsened by Zane's dissociative identity disorder which he slowly developed from sexual and psychological abuse earlier in the book from his overbearing father; his fragmented pessimist personalities preach to the younger crew and make them disillusioned of the idea that they are all enclosed and observed from the 'outside world' in a simulated bio-sphere environment as a social experiment. Eventually this all leads to further mutiny as the younger crew try to break out of the ship, which consequently results in ship-wide explosive decompression that inflicts a large loss of life and causes the destruction of one of the onboard shuttle-based landing craft. Once recovering from the incident, Holle forcibly takes command by reluctantly forming a dictatorship under her rule, using threats to shut off life support for those who do not partake in the maintenance of the ship's systems to keep order except for those who are too vital for the ship, as done with Zane as she orders him to be isolated and kept alive only for the purposes of keeping the warp drive functional. This act shatters the friendships of the original crew, and with no hope to help his deteriorating state of mind and being kept alone, unloved, and alive as merely a tool as he had for most of his life, Zane commits suicide.

While this is occurring, the floodwaters inundate Denver, and Kelly's ex-husband Don, Gordo, and Mel, ex-Candidate and Holle's former lover make a last stand at Alma, Colorado, which was the nearest habitable area near the former starship launch site and Mission Control for the Ark before it departed from Jupiter. In the ensuing melee, Don is killed.

In 2061, when Seba returns to Earth, Lily Brooke (Flood's principal protagonist) has been dead for the last three years. Thandie Jones continues to survive and has links to 'Ark Two', which turns out to be a (new) and expansive seafloor settlement which taps the geothermal energy from the submerged former Yellowstone National Park's supercaldera. Kelly meets her aged father, Edward Kenzie, and her estranged son Dexter, whom she voluntarily abandoned for a place on board. Mel has also survived, but Gordo Alonzo died defending Ark Two from ID interlopers before the rising floodwaters made further interference impossible. Human genetic engineering is postulated to assist the descendants of Ark Two to adapt to their new and arduous and environmental conditions. This idea ("pantropy"), used by James Blish in his story suite The Seedling Stars, is a powerful theme in almost all of Baxter's fictional series.

Two years before Halivah arrives at Earth III, Venus intercepted a strong, brief signal of unknown origin and was not repeated (similar to the Wow! signal received by SETI), and it is speculated to be extraterrestrial. She keeps the knowledge of the signal to herself.

In 2081, the ship arrives at Earth III which turns out to be in a close proximity to its parent star, its surface is active with volcanoes and its climate frigidly cold from the weak solar heating of the red dwarf along with one side permanently facing away from the star, but the planet is nonetheless habitable enough to support photosynthetic life and by extension, human life. With only one landing craft left after the mutiny years earlier, Holle is forced to halve the crew through a careful selection of those to colonize the planet, specifically young children who are as diverse as possible to eliminate the risk of inbreeding. Wilson is selected to go for he is the only one who could fly the shuttle despite his age, and finally Helen is selected to go to educate the young colonists for the process of building a functional colony to prosper. After a painful goodbye to her mother Grace, and to her own children, Helen and the settlers disembark. However, Holle and Venus resolve to explore the star system's other planets using small warp-jumps. The novel is left open-ended: Wilson, Helen, and the forty children on board the shuttle craft successfully land on Earth III, set foot on its surface and begin planning for rebuilding human civilization while they see the Ark for the last time before it disappears into the cosmos, suggesting that the starship has effectively become a generation ship until the rebuilt civilization of Earth III, that may not rise for decades, centuries, or even millennia to become spaceflight capable, can reunite with the descendants of the Ark.

Horizon_Universe

Ark se passe plus ou moins sur la même temporalité que Flood où, pour rappel, la montée drastique des eaux pousse l’humanité dans ses derniers retranchements - et là où nous avions suivi une partie des survivants dans le premier tome, nous en suivons d’autres, qui eux ont choisi de quitter la Terre à bord d’un vaisseau spatial, pour tenter de trouver mieux ailleurs.

Si le premier tome était assez lent à démarrer, et comportait quelques longueurs, et si celui-ci a aussi du mal à engager l’histoire, Ark est une petite BOMBE passé le premier tiers. Personnages bien foutus et centraux à l’intrigue (rare pour du Baxter), éléments de hard SF importants MAIS ne prenant pas le pas sur l'histoire (rare pour du Baxter x2), moi qui adore les histoires avec vaisseaux générationnels à la Seveneves, j’ai été servie. C’est plutôt bien foutu, ça se lit très bien, la fin ouverte est intéressante et bien amenée. J’adhère !

Arnklad

I really enjoyed this book, though it does have some harsh lights on humanity in places.

Kit

I am finally free of this damn series and I am so glad that Baxter has moved on so I don't have to drag myself through another one of these books. I promised myself I would finish out the series. The completionist in me is a terrible horrible soul who clearly hates me.

I hated Flood. It was an incredibly trying 500 pages that left me drained and angry. I don't know why I was expecting Ark to be any different and boy did it disappoint.

Stephen Baxter has great ideas but has minimal writing skills which makes for a very frustrating and often unpleasant experience. I give a lot of leeway to hard/realistic scifi authors on prose because the science is often the main attraction, but the combo of Baxter's habits are just insufferable at points. The whole experience is just so dull. The prose is dry and reads like a textbook, the characters suffer from the fact that they are all one dimensional and share the same voice, Baxter has a horrible habit of repeating the same idea/text repeatedly in a short period of time. His pacing is just awful almost the first half of the book is dedicated to a flashback (that ends with an almost WORD FOR WORD COPY OF A PREVIOUS SCENE) and then nothing really happens until the last 100 pages. Everything moves so goddamn slowly and the action is over before any real conflict can develop. There were some really horrendous comma splices in this book too and lots of things that should have been changed/altered to really make them mean anything. The worst part is when things start getting just awful with his writing they slide *fast*. The plotholes become these huge nonsensical holes in the middle of a book that is striving for ultimate realism and the book as a whole suffers. I stopped even pretending to care about the time the lotto scene came up.

Which brings me to content. This book amazingly made Flood even worse and even more pointless, which is really something I didn't think was possible. It's abundantly clear that Hollie was the only really important or developed character - which isn't saying much as she was absolutely flat for 90% of the book - and all attempts at telling the other stories in this book were overshadowed. There was an entire plotline that was just dropped and ignored after all of the drama to set it up. I appreciate the care for the science and the realism, but I feel like there was a lot missing from making the characters feel human. I felt like a lot of it just didn't make any damn sense (see: the lotto, the split, Zach) and there was no real care into crafting the characters who should have been the main focus. I really don't know what else to say.

This whole book needed to be restructured and written in a completely different way. The boring prose ruined any chance at this story being interesting. I know Baxter gets a lot of praise in scifi circles (everyone tells me Flood/Ark are his worst books) but I don't know if I will ever be able to pick up another one of his books. I'm going to enjoy my freedom and move onto books that don't make me cry with frustration. I'll move on to shitty books that at least are bad enough to be fun.

Yolanda Sfetsos

After reading Flood a few weeks ago, I couldn't wait to read this one. The epic story that started while the world was flooded by the rising sea levels, continues in this installment. And becomes so much more than just a disaster story.

The book opens in 2041, when Grace Gray is taken to Colorado so that she can take part in Ark One. Here, the astronaut Gordo Alonzo gives her a test--she'll have to solve a murder. Of course, at the time I had no idea who Harry Smith (the murdered man) was. Or Holle, the young woman who's charged with showing Grace around.

So it was awesome when the story jumped back to 2025. Where we meet Patrick Groundwater and his six-year-old daughter, Holle. They're attending a meeting about the very secret Ark projects. And so begins Holle's life as a potential Candidate for Ark One. We follow her and a group of kids who will be trained from a very young age, intended to be part of the crew that'll be sent on a mission to find the projected Eath II.

The idea of using a warp drive and launching a spaceship using nuclear bombs is both fascinating and frightening. Yet, it works. I love how Stephen Baxter blends the human condition and science in a way that keeps you glued to every page.

The actual ship blasting off correctly is about the only thing that goes according to plan on Launch day, because half of the crew that was supposed to be onboard actually weren't. The mission to the stars doesn't start well, as the Candidates leave a very chaotic world behind. This pretty much sets the mood for the rest of the trip.

What follows is an amazing, negative, drab, and very claustrophobic trip in search of a new planet to live in, so it can become humanity's salvation. A journey that slowly disintegrates. It was one thing to plan and imagine how this mission would go, but what actually happens is a slow deterioration of spirits, hopes, and dreams. A bunch of humans packed into a tin can that keeps them all too close. Their offspring only add to the madness. Not to mention the Split--where one group goes back to Earth, another settles in the hostile Earth II, and the final group decide to spend another 30 years in search of a better possible planet, Earth III.

I was also very excited to go back to Earth and catch up with Thandie Jones, while getting a little taste of Ark Two.

Ark is another fantastic, epic, and at often times, grim adventure. It's a race for human survival after our planet has been engulfed by the sea. It's an amazing story of human endurance and corruption, when the hard decisions have to be made for the future. The cast is also amazing. Not just the characters we met in Flood, like Thandie and Grace, but also the strong Holle, manipulative Kelly, insane and complicated Zane, and headstrong Venus who never gives up on the ultimate quest.

I absolutely LOVED this book. And I have to admit... I'm secretly hoping that Stephen Baxter writes another installment in this world.

Lee

Ark mostly concludes the grim story begun by Baxter in
Flood, a particularly un-cosy catastrophe novel wherein global sea levels rose without end. Conflicting and ultimately academic arguments were proffered as to why this was happening. Finally the human race was split between those hoping that the waters would stop their rise and the select few attempting survival on a vast unsinkable ship, Ark III.

As the old saying goes, where there's an Ark III, there's probably an Ark I and Ark II. Hints were given in Flood that Ark I was a spaceship, and one of the central characters was even dropped off partway through the book to board it. This book picks up her story as she joins the crew of an experimental faster-than-light ship meant to carry its crew to a new Earth.

There are some cute touches in the story, such as the plausibility of the faster-than-light drive being questioned by its engineer after it's been used successfully for several years. It's not clear whether this is Baxter
hanging a lantern on it or just a subtle apology for the artifice. Given the difficulty in giving humanity plausible FTL by the 2040s, I'd suspect the normally scientifically rigorous Baxter was just saying sorry.

Why only two stars? It's simply because the unrelenting misery of the story made it nigh-on impossible for me to really enjoy it. Flood was similarly depressing, but at least watching the world go to pieces has appeal, kind of überschadenfreude. Or maybe even kummerspeck. Watching Ark III and its crew fail miserably wasn't fun, but at least there was the promise of its two namesakes to get things right. Without giving the entire story away, things do not go smoothly for Ark I in this book, and any hope that Ark II might get things right are dashed when we give them a brief visit too.

I know Baxter isn't shy about having these grim, unhappy endings on huge scales, but that doesn't make it any easier to digest. I did go out and read Earth II and Earth III, the two short stories that follow on from the events in this book, hoping for some glint of happiness or some much needed closure. I'd be lying if I said I found it there either.

Jason

Audiobook. I'm not quite sure why I'm doing this; it's not like I enjoyed the first one (Flood) all that much. But the completest in me is driving this choice I guess. Also, it looks like it might plug into my generational starship thing, appropriately enough coming off the heels of Bear's Hull Zero Three.

.................................
My final verdict pretty much matches my expectation going in. In these two books Baxter has a way of flitting over points of drama without making the reader suffer through them. In the final analysis I don't think this is a good thing. (Were the books he co-authored with Clarke like this? Somewhat, I guess.) Still, I would not be surprised that the inevitable third and fourth books will find their way onto my ipod one day. I just can't seem to help myself with this stuff.

There was one nice thing about this book: A standard feature of the generational starship sub-genre is that the crew has forgotten that they are on a starship at some point in the voyage. Usually the story starts after this point. In Ark Baxter shows us the process of how this forgetting might plausibly happen. Still, that's probably not enough to recommend it.

Dave

Ark is the direct sequel to Flood and, alas is just not as much fun. It's got everything a Stephen Baxter book should have, hard sci-fi, great characters and so forth, but there is an all pervading sense of doom about the book, and the characters' mission (although it's quite optimistic in many ways) that is as relentless as the rising flood waters. He seems to have a quite grim view of humanity.

There are echoes of one of the short stories from Transcendence in here too for the regular Baxter reader, and his fascination with evolution in the face of serious environmental change is seemingly unending. I found the book dragged a little towards the final third but really picked up again in the last chapter.

Read this if you enjoyed Flood, just to see how things turn out for Thandie and friends, but don't bother if you've not already read Flood as the setting won't make much sense.

Joe

I was very disappointed in this book, in a way that disagrees with most of the reviews I've read. People seem to think it's not much of a story, but has good characters ... I found the opposite. The characters were paper-thin, especially the females who were just unconvincing as human beings. Characters made completely illogical choices utterly at odds with their characters and circumstances. I felt like the author wanted to write certain scenes, and so he manipulated character choices to get the results he wanted ... no matter ho unnatural the character choices ended up being.

I actually liked the story part, it was OK, but the characters were not interesting or believable.

Stonebender

I wasn't aware that _Ark_ was a sequel. This is the first Stephen Baxter book I've read. It's a quick read and I think if I hadn't been looking forward to a book about colonization of another planet, I may have liked it more. This book was much more about the possible social consequences of a really long space voyage. I also thought it was interesting that Stephen spent a lot of time with the people left behind. There were a lot of people who selflessly contributed to a voyage they would never benefit from except having the knowledge they may have contributed to the continuation of humanity.

David

Flood was enjoyable, but Ark was better. Flood followed the slow rise of the oceans over a generation to cover all available land, so half the interest was watching which cities and areas went under first, and the other half was the implications, political and personal, as the available living space shrank and everyone fought for survival. Ark, on the other hand, was much more personal, following the lives of those few selected for the mission to plant humanity elsewhere in the stars.

John Doez

Como en la primera parte, el argumento es interesantísimo y plausible desde el punto de vista científico y social. Los personajes tienen un buen perfil. Sin embargo, me quedo con la sensación de que el autor podía sacarle un poco más de fuerza a un argumento tan interesante y que los personajes podrían ser un poco más redondos. Supongo que es una cuestión de estilo.

Quinton

I really did like it, love it, even. As I said after reading The Flood, I can't wait to continue reading the series and more by Stephen Baxter. WAIT I JUST LOOKED AND THERE IS NO SEQUEL THAT'S MESSED UP I'M SO DISAPPOINTED!

Imane

This book was very interesting to me . It had numerous scientific facts and information.I would highly recommend it for people who are interested in sc-fi ,for this book is worth reading .

Title	:	Ark (Flood, #2)
Author	:	Stephen Baxter
Rating	:
ISBN	:	0575080574
ISBN-10	:	9780575080577
Language	:	English
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	457
Publication	:	First published August 20, 2009

Ark (Flood, #2) by Stephen Baxter

Ark (Flood, #2) Reviews

Ark (Flood, #2) Reviews

Releated on Ark (Flood, #2)