Flood (Flood, #1) By Stephen Baxter

Susan

Before I started writing this review, I wondered whether I was being unfair to this book, as it is so out of my comfort zone. I read this for my ‘non-Goodreads.’ Reading group, and it is certainly not the type of book I would usually choose. However, on reflection, I don’t think I can judge it on anything other than how I felt about it – which was bored and irritated.

It probably wasn’t helped by the fact that I listened to this on Audible – narrated by Chris Patton, an ‘American voice actor.’ Well, admittedly, he could do American accents, but unfortunately many of the characters in this book are English. Mr Patton ranged from an uneasy Dick Van Dyke to a bizarre twang, which resembled a South African accent more than anything else, alongside a laughable Peter Sellers Indian, which may have been offensive, had I not given up life by this point. He was also unable to pronounce almost any UK place name, as we raced around, “Wool-wich,” or some such place.

This is an adventure story, where characters rush around, surrounded by natural – and man-made disasters, but characters in such fast-paced novels do not have to be stereotypical or wooden. Unfortunately, in this novel they are both. We begin with a group of hostages, released by a megalomaniac billionaire, who then keeps a vaguely proprietary eye on them for the next however many years this book goes on for. For the characters emerge into a world which is flooding and, as the water rises higher and higher, people are pushed onto higher ground, or onto the water on various rafts and other crafts - including, bizarrely, a replica of the Queen Mary (remember the bizarre billionaire?)

This could have been an interesting book. It’s an interesting idea. However, frankly I did not care what happened to anyone in this book, nor did the author engage me in any way. This may be my fault and I accept that it could well appeal to you. Frankly, I have almost never finished a book with more relief… There is a sequel to this book, “Ark.” I won’t be reading it though.

Richard

In 1977, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote
Lucifer's Hammer, a novel dealing with the collapse of civilization after the Earth is hit by a massive comet.

When it was written, the world’s major anxiety was nuclear weapons: The possibility that the United States and the Soviet Union (with a much smaller role played by China) would annihilate humanity with a massive exchange of explosions and radiation was a pervasive nightmare. Lucifer's Hammer was a clear response to this anxiety. It allowed the authors the chance to explore many of the likely consequences of nuclear war without triggering the enmity of either the “peace-nik” or “warmonger” crowds. Curiously, it wasn’t until several years later that the “nuclear winter” hypothesis made a cometary impact an even more appropriate stand-in for a massive nuclear exchange.

The book also pointed out that “nature” could mete out punishment far in excess of anything humans could inflict on themselves. We’re relative pikers at creating Extinction Level Events.

Flood, by Stephen Baxter, is a well-intentioned effort to replicate this.

Today, climate change is the fear, whose most visible consequence would be rising sea levels. Baxter takes this latter phenomena and extrapolates a runaway “Flood” scenario to make it much, much worse. As with Lucifer's Hammer, each step of the escalating threat is lovingly detailed, and eventually long stretches of time are elided to show the consequences and resolutions of earlier crises. Both books end with elderly survivors watching the youth of a post-apocalyptic generation with hope, despair and affection.

Unfortunately, Baxter didn’t write a very good book.

The book’s strength is, oddly for a “hard” science fiction effort, in the characters. Each is a well crafted and unique personality. Most are personable enough that we care about their fates, sometimes grudgingly, others are distasteful enough that we also care about their fates, although perhaps with animosity. But our affection or disdain won’t last nearly as long as the book — the end simply takes too long to reach. The first half or so moves adequately fast, when the extent of the disaster is still being revealed, but once we are clued in to the world’s ultimate fate... the details of how individuals react are undoubtedly necessary, but not riveting enough to keep things interesting.

For fans of hard science fiction, perhaps the biggest failure of the book is the wholly manufactured crisis. We’ve been told by trustworthy scientists that a major cometary impact is only a matter of time, so Lucifer's Hammer doesn’t take a huge leap of faith. But after billions of years of peacefully waiting in the Earth’s mantle, why would Baxter’s flood decide to bubble up at all, much less now?

For many others, the problem is simply the length of the book — or at least the perceived length. There are many thousand-page books that stay engaging throughout, which is something this five-hundred page novel did not.

My recommendation: If you want the better apocalyptic story, read the thirty-year-old Lucifer's Hammer. If you really want a plausible depiction of how the world might end after this very implausible disaster, then Baxter’s slow novel is serviceable.

Patrick Gibson

I really wanted to like this book. I really did. I am a huge fan of apocalyptic fiction. On the surface, this book seems to fit the bill. The seas are rising, the earth is flooding - what will humanity do to survive? What's not to like - right? Well, it turns out - quite a bit.

This is the first book in a long time that I have had to force myself to get through. The first 50 pages or so have some flashes of interest, but mostly read like stale and overly long description of geography and topography in and around London. It was a grind to get up and going with this book. It's by Stephen Baxter; an award winning SF author whose books I have seen on shelves for years. I had never read one of his books until now - probably not a good choice on my part.

The story starts as four hostages are released by religious extremists in Barcelona, Spain after five years of captivity. They travel to England and try to catch up with the world they left behind. One major development is that the world's oceans have started to rise - albeit slowly. The story then follows the four hostages, and some of the acquaintances they make along the way, as the situation becomes more and more dire, and the oceans rise higher and higher (over the course of 40+ years).

There you go - you have the whole story. Sure, there is some attempt at character development and a novel explanation of why the oceans are rising (thankfully not global warming - I would have dropped the book there if the author had taken such an easy and false way out)- but there was a fundamental lack of story that I couldn't get past. The book wanted to feel like a sweeping epic; chronicling the slow demise of the planet and taking us along on humanity's struggle to survive - following the "hostages" as their stories wove in and out of the story of the end of the world. Instead, I found it pedestrian, unfulfilling, and at times - boring. .

I did, however persevere through the book, and found a few nuggets along the way. Towards the end of the book there is a scene where much of what is left of humanity gathers in rafts around the remaining speck of land on the globe - the peak of Mount Everest. It was one of the few emotional moments I connected with in the book - the idea of watching the last peak disappear beneath the waves was a powerful visual. Still - it was too little, much too late, and didn't carry the weight in the story that it should have.

It kept me just engaged enough to keep going, and did provide me with an interesting end of the world scenario. I did not, however, emotionally invest in the characters and ultimately didn't care what happened to them. The end of the book was perfectly set up for a sequel, which came out this spring (Ark, anyone?). I won't be going back to see what happens next.

FotisK

Οι οφειλές του Σ. Μπάξτερ στον Α. Κλαρκ είναι εμφανείς και αναγνωρίσιμες και σε αυτό το βιβλίο, το οποίο, μετά λύπης μου ομολογώ, είναι το πλέον αδιάφορο εξ όσων έχω διαβάσει από τον εν λόγω συγγραφέα (τα εξής δύο: "Πλοία του χρόνου" και "Σχεδία").
Κλασική Ε.Φ. με ενδιαφέρον θέμα αλλά μετριότατη διεκπεραίωση, τέτοια ώστε με την πάροδο των σελίδων με οδήγησε σε αδιαφορία για τη μοίρα των ηρώων, περιμένοντας απλά να δω το πώς θα χειριστεί ο συγγραφέας το κεντρικό θέμα του κατακλυσμού. Παρεμπιπτόντως, υπάρχει συνέχεια (μη μεταφρασμένη προφανώς), για όσους ενδιαφερόμενους, στο "Arc".
Φοβάμαι όμως πως ο διαθέσιμος χρόνος μου δεν επιτρέπει τέτοιου είδους παρεκκλίσεις από βιβλία σημαντικότερα (πριν 15-20 χρόνια δεν θα είχα τέτοιο δίλλημα, αλλά φευ…)
Θα το βαθμολογούσα με 2.5/5, αν επιτρεπόταν.

Chris

I imagine this book happened this way. A group of intelligent science fiction writers were sitting around a table and drinking perhaps a bit too much and they were making a list of the worst science fiction movies of all time. Stephen Baxter who was a little drunk at the time shouts out "Waterworld!" and everyone laughs especially at the fish gilled Kevin Costner character. And seriously where did all that water come from! And then Stephen got a glassy look on his face and said you know what? I can make that work! I can make Waterworld plausible. His friends all laughed in his face, so Stephen got determined and unlike most ideas we get when we are drinking he said not only will I make Waterworld plausible I'll create a TRILOGY! So there you have it whether you asked for it or not you now have a plausible version of Waterworld.

What about characters you ask? Well no one reads Baxter for the characters and this isn't the book to start expecting to. They aren't bad and they might be interesting but Baxter tends to lose interest in them in order to explore his ideas and extrapolate where those ideas would lead. And if you've read your Baxter, and I have, you know that where all this ends up is never pleasant nor can anyone do much about it.

Ideas are great, people are interesting when you get some time with them, and the pacing is okay if a bit slow. Enjoy the big idea, think about what it means, and see the fireworks as it all plays out. Average Baxter is still better than most idea books that you will read.

Bill Lenoir

For a fan of end-of-the-world stories, what's not to like about this book? It posits a world where massive oceans underneath the Earth's mantle have broken through and are slowly flooding the world as we know it. Over the course of four decades, the sea level rises to eventually drown Mt. Everest. The struggle to deal with this slow motion catastrophe is ripe for any number of plots. So, what's not to like? Plenty.

Flood is a bad book. I don't mean subjectively bad like I prefer apples over oranges. I mean objectively bad in that this fruit is rotten. Bad books aren't unusual. Most, though, can be fixed by a good editor. Not so this book. It needed a competent author.

First of all, a vast majority of this book is masses of expository text: One character bringing another up to speed on a third, the narrator describing the science behind some phenomenon, or, my bête noir, maps drawn with words. Do I really need to be told everything? Can nothing be left to the imagination?

Well, yes, actually: most of what should pass for a story. What purpose do the characters serve? I mean, other than to keep the reader up to date. How about some emotion? What little there is seems to have a misogynistic bent. Consider this:

A man marries a woman to get at her pre-teen daughter.
That now teen-age daughter is the object of desire for a man three decades her senior.
Another woman was impregnated by rape and gave birth before the book starts.
That child, as a grown woman, is tricked into a marriage so she can get pregnant as part of a plan to "save" her.

Most of this occurs off-handedly, like it's a normal, every day occurrence. How about something a little more than one line blurted out at the end of a chapter? My favorite involved the group that trekked all the way from Nebraska to the Andes in hopes of finding refuge. After years of effort, one of the main characters asks for entrance into the city, but is denied. When told of this, a companion responds, "Well, you tried."

This blandness is accentuated by the disjointed nature of the storyline. The book feels like it was assembled from a set of random story points. Where the paths don't match up, enter the deus ex machina. No, seriously, this is a line from a scene where the main character, thinking she will down, is rescued by another in a submarine: "Hi, Lily. What an entrance. Talk about a deus ex machina, huh?" This kind of coincidence is so common throughout the book, that I could anticipate them. In fact, one of the characters, Nathan Lammockson, is a walking god in the machine. Two characters need to get across the world in a hurry? Nathan's a rich man, he'll get you there. There's no problem he can't solve. Oh, no! Our boat's sinking! That's OK, Nathan had his scientists genetically engineer some sea weed we can use to build a raft.

Finally, and this is a personal issue for me, the information architecture of the book is chaotic. There are parts divided into chapters which are sub-divided into blocks of paragraphs separated by extra space. Do these have meaning? No. The dividing lines seem to have no meaning. A single scene can stretch across a part boundary while a sub-section gap can be years. Some chapters have dates, but most don't. Finally, some chapters are labeled as one of the character's scrapbook, except its not written any differently than other narration. This chaos is not the cause of the book's problems, but rather a symptom that little thought has gone into the story's structure.

I love end-of-the-world stories. I'm desperate for good ones. I got schnookered by this one.

Ron

Ripping good fiction; mediocre (at best) science fiction--flawed by egregious errors in history, geography and science.

Without giving away too much, it's hard to enumerate where he went wrong. His interpersonal relationships lack credibility. His knowledge of things American is superficial and often wrong. He ignores the thousands of ships and boats--large and small (including a dozen American aircraft carriers, though he creates two British carriers from whole cloth) in his rush to depopulate the ocean.

Baxter's two novels a year writing pace may relate to the shoddy research and proofing of this story. From his own Afterword one gets the impression he rounded up a couple sources and wove a tale.

Bryan Alexander

What a devastating and epic novel. Flood is the story of planetary catastrophe, of a titular flood that subsumes human civilization.

Baxter offers a small group of characters to humanize this disaster. Intriguingly, they are all former hostages, comrades in privation. This bonds them for life, setting them up as a team who try to aid each other as the world goes to hell.

And to a watery hell it races. Flood begins by drowning London and southeast England, and never lets up. The oceans simply keep rising, and we track this by regular updates on by just how many meters above 2010 norms sea level has ascended. The source of this is not climate change, but the catastrophic release of subterranean bodies of water. Several scientist characters offer hypotheses to explain this, yet never fully convince anyone, especially as the scientific enterprise itself falters and collapses.

This is not a typical disaster book. There are no real heroes, no major plotlines of rescue, very little politics. Instead Flood is a hard science fiction novel crossed with one of J.G. Ballard's world-destroying books (The Drowned World, The Burning World, The Crystal World). We get superbly detailed descriptions of ruined cities and vast storms, alterations to oceanic ecosystems and dystopian planned communities.

It is also deeply sad - in its impact on me as reader, not in explicit tone. I found it hard to stop reading as a rubbernecker, turning (or clicking on) pages to see the next horror.

But it's not explicitly sad. Characters do not mourn, usually. They are numb, exhausted, very emotionally controlled. We see more destruction than death. There are moments of human horror - notably a brutal Tibetan enclave - but Flood concerns itself more with ecological devastation. I'm not sure what to make of this, if it's a sign of realism with people being too worn out and overwhelmed to emote, or a limitation of Baxter's writing range.

I fear the latter. Characters don't develop so much as appear with quick updates: so and so is now pregnant, this guy has become rebellious, ah but now he's cowed. This seems largely due to the book's scale, but Baxter clearly wants us to track and sympathize with these people. Which didn't work for me. But maybe this is because of a posthuman, planetary perspective. Or a cold, distancing effect, a la
"the likes of Lovecraft, Houellebecq, Howard and Vance." Ah, upon this decision hangs a single Goodreads star from me!

More details:
-An early theme is that of scientists unable to recognize new evidence or challenges to hypotheses. It's a good, somewhat sardonic take of Kuhn's paradigm shift.
-Another plot takes place in Peru, and offers the hard symbolism of the entire human race as the former Incan empire.
-Although the book begins with a set of hostage characters, Lily remains the central protagonist.
-Human ingenuity keeps some of us afloat (har har) longer than we should have, and enables the rise of a new generation.
-Another reference is Olaf Stapledon. Flood feels like a lost chapter from Last and First Men.
-More politics: as the flood rises human societies become more cruel, more unequal, more tyrannical.

Traci

Two stars seems rather harsh for a book that I was able to finish, but going by the good reads guidelines "it was okay". So two stars it is.

A small group of hostages are rescued after years of captivity and find themselves in an unrecognizable world where the oceans are slowly taking over.

Interesting enough premise. Not as preachy as one might imagine. The message of man destroying Mother Earth is there but I don't think it's enough to bother anyone. My problem was the writing itself. The characters just float (ha) through the pages. The emotional impact is glossed over. The hostages are fine in the next chapter from being rescued. The connection between the characters seem contrived. And I felt nothing for any of them. I also have to mention that every male character had problems with being machismo. And every female character caved into it or in some way was forced to.

I also found it a little stereotypical. It never crossed the line into what I would consider racism. I think it was more a case of shallow writing.

I have a problem with a lot of apocalyptic work. I can't believe humanity would go down without a fight. Even if it was a losing battle. I don't think our future would rest on one lone business man. Strangely the world's governments are for the most part missing.

I'm a fan of life finding a way science fiction. And am intrigued by future human evolution, purely in a fantastical setting. And at the end there is a touch of this. Enough so that I'm tempted to read the next book even though I really didn't like this one.

Dennis

3.5 stars

Pete

I find myself seeing the points of reviews that rated this lower, HOWEVER I will say that this is probably the best book that I have read this year. And I would argue that I have read a number of really good books. In fact I would like to give this a higher rating if it was possible.

Baxter is indeed very Clarke-ian and for that I love him. Concept, Sci-fi and story are all well conceptualized, researched and realized. The characters some complain were a bit flat, but the character were well rendered for their use. Their purpose was secondary to the story. Yes they conveyed the emotion of the events in the book, but unless you have a defect of your own you will feel emotion whether the characters force it on you or not.

A phenomenal book, the concept and story are primary while the characters serve the purpose of the story not the other way around. This is typical of hardcore sci-fi and that is fine by me.

Doug

Stephen Baxter is a prolific author, and it shows in a number of his works - they are very Clarkian, taking an interesting idea (in this case a vast planet drowning flood) and following it to it's conclusion.

As with many of his books the typical cast of scientists are generally unreflective and fail to present a plausible inner life in response to what is going on around them.

Undoubtedly, as with Clarke, this is because Baxter is more interested in pursuing his idea to it's conclusion, rather than the the inner life of his characters. This is not atypical of SF in general, but it's particularly marked in Baxter's work because often, as in this book, the central theme is a terrifying extinction event where we once again see the last few humans struggling to survive. This makes their general lack of reflection seem even more psychopathic than in less extreme works.

Aside from these flaws it's reasonably compelling and has a sort of gruesome inevitability about it which is quite satisfying.

Val

I knew this was not going to go well when one character said to another that it stood to reason that floodwater would not rise higher than the old (pre-Roman) shoreline. The author had earlier said that sea levels had risen one metre between 2010 and 2016, on top of the measured rise between 1900 and 2010 (around 20cm) and any earlier changes. He was also describing a storm surge at the time which had over-topped the 20.1m high Thames Barrier. Instead of pointing out that the position of the beach two millennia earlier was as relevant and reasonable as the proverbial banana in the circumstances, our character goes sploshing off down the Strand.
This mixture of irrelevance, error and confusion continues throughout the book. It is about rising sea levels, but from hydrothermal plumes rather than global warming; at least I think it is, although it is mainly about some people meeting each other in various disaster areas over a period of years.
I have seen this book called 'hard sci-fi', but it is difficult to understand why. There are various scientific 'facts' scattered throughout the book, but few of them are relevant to the story and there are no scientific explanations for anything that does happen. There are also a lot of errors in various scientific fields, including hydrodynamics, communication technology, oceanography, climatology, genetics and even some of the geography (he sinks the Urals and Caucasus far too soon). I assume the author can plot an exponential curve, he is a mathematics graduate, but gives no reason why sea level rise should be exponential. He cannot decide whether the polar ice caps are melting or not.
He also does not include the accepted components of fiction, such as a coherent plot, some character development or finely crafted sentences. Perhaps this book is experimental fiction, or perhaps it is just an incompetent mess.
The only thing hard about the book was finishing the blasted thing.

Michael

I picked up Flood a few years ago, just days before real-life flooding took place in Nashville. And while my family was spared any major damage or direct impact from the flooding, I still knew a lot of people whose lives were impacted by it.

And so it was that this novel languished on my to-be-read shelf for what a couple of years. Finally, a few weeks, it rose to the top of my to-be-read pile and I decided enough time had passed that I decided to pick it up and give it a try.

As with all Stephen Baxter novels, there are some fascinating ideas here. There's a lot of solid, hard science and the story about water levels rising on the planet and the consequences of that are told without too much political hay made about climate change or global warming.

It's just too bad that Baxter couldn't create any characters quite as compelling as the situation and the science unfolding on the page. (It's why I'm uncertain of just how exactly his tie-in Doctor Who novel, set in the second Doctor era will go. It could be utterly fantastic or a complete train wreck). The big issue I have with these characters is they're all archetypes and little else. And their story arcs tend to follow a fairly routine and at times predictable path. There aren't enough surprises from a character standpoint. It's not quite as bad as other apocalyptic genre novels (I'm looking at you Lucifer's Hammer) where I wanted the cataclysmic event to occur simply to kill off the characters, but it ws close at times.

However, Baxter does create enough of an interesting mystery as the book closes that, dang it, I will probably pick up the sequel to this one (a library check-out, probably not a purchase) sooner rather than later.

Ironically, as I finished this novel, the local forecast calls for heavy rains this weekend with possible flooding....

Kit

This book is nothing but constant frustration. It promises a thrilling story centered around the loss of our home planet, as told from the perspective of a group of survivors. It's a great concept, global warming and rising sea levels but it fails over and over and over. The science is shaky at best, and while I can over look that there is no getting passed the horrid pacing and lackluster characters.

The book suffers from "too much stuff" plain and simple. There is so much time spent on world building and explaining the new (and sometimes wrong) geography that the book never is gripping. It's dull and lifeless, and it is worsened by the characters that are never give any development or detailed personalities. There are brief moments of grief and human moments, but it's overshadowed by the fact that the book is written almost like a text book with a jarring amount of chapter breaks and time skips. Characters die and it isn't mentioned for chapters, and when it is brought up it's 3 years later and no one is remotely sad over it anymore. One of the main character practically serves as an incubator to stir up drama and plot that will drive the next book. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but it's the only way I can explain it.

Overall, the book is stale with a few moments of solid writing. I'm hesitant to look at another book from the author because of the less than stellar writing and piss poor pacing. I don't hate the book, but I don't think I'll see it as anything more than a bunch of examples of how not to tell a story.

Nick

Imagine a future where the world slowly submerges, and the survivors in desperation fight for passage on the Titanic, knowing it too is doomed, but not having any other alternative.

(No additional spoilers). Baxter has written an exceptionally well thought out hard-science-fiction novel. After thousands of apocalyptic novels now published, it's amazing that a new 'means to end' was created.

This is a thinking person's 2012, with some decent characterization and plot lines. Baxter's tempo of the novel matches the events that occur in the backdrop. I immediately picked up the followup novel,
Ark, after finishing this.

Maria

Έχει μέσα απο όλα....απλά ωμό και λεπτομερέστερα περιγραφικό απαντά στο ερώτημα τι θα κάναμε αν ζούσαμε πραγματικά ένα κατακλυσμό, κάτι που εγώ προσωπικά πριν αλλά και μετά που διάβασα το βιβλίο δεν θέλω καν να σκέφτομαι, μέσω της φαντασίας του συγγραφέα...σε μερικά σημεία ειδικά ήταν σοκαριστικό και με κινηματογραφική πλοκή..συνδυασμός των ταινιών 2012,μετά την επόμενη μέρα και flood...παρά την ακαταλαβιστική αρχή του (είναι μέχρι να μπείς στο κλίμα της πλοκής) είναι ότι πρέπει για τους λάτρεις του είδους like me...i totally recommend it...

Susan May

Fantastic read. What a vision.

Liz Barnsley

Enjoyed this one but thought it went on a bit. An apocalyptic Lord of the Rings if you like. Full review to follow. Still want to read Ark though!

Heather

This book ticked all my boxes, the usual ones I love such as disasters kicking mankind's behind, the world slowly falling to its knees, unscrupulous so and so's making fortunes from the planet's demise and the fact that what is happening in the book could quite possible happen.

It starts with our introduction to the group of hostages are the characters who take us through the story, their lives intertwining as the world disappears under the waves.

The sea levels are rising but they are rising faster than expected, now this is the bit I really enjoyed (that sounds bad when I read that back!) the description of the landmarks, the cities, towns, places that we know and love vanishing under the water, it really was horrific. There is a map in my copy and the landmasses on the planet get smaller and smaller as the years go on, the world gets smaller and the population (which has also got smaller) is running out of safe havens.

Now I really wanted to enjoy this book and the whole end of the world by biblical flood sold the story to me but I'd say about three-quarters in to the book I got a little fed up, the characters just started to grate a little, maybe there was too many of them for my liking, maybe I'm just picky but I just started to lose any support I felt for them.

Flood also features a savvy billionaire who uses the flooding to his advantage to line his pockets, he plans to help save mankind just not all of it.

So to sum up this was an ok read but I found it was lacking something towards that three-quarter mark that could propel my reading happily without having to force myself past that point.

Mima

Baxterin Tulva-duologia alkaa aika groteskisti, jopa minun väkivaltaan turtunut mieleni kohahti kun luin panttivankien kohtelusta. Onneksi se on ainoa kirjassa esiintyvä äklö-gore-kohta.
Kun vesi alkaa nousta enemmän kuin tiedemiehet suostuvat ymmärtämään ja hallitukset yrittävät rauhoitella kansalaisiaan pääsevät päähenkilömme rikkaan visionäristin suojeluksessa kokemaan jotain mistä muut eivät voi uneksiakaan. Kirjassa seurataan nelikon elämää n. 40 vuoden aikajänteellä tulvan valtaaman maapallon myllerryksissä. Mahtavan avartavia ajatuksia nousi dystopiaa rakastavaan mieleeni ihmisen ahdingosta kun nouseva vesi valtaa merkittävässä määrin ihmiskunnan elämiseen soveltuvaa maapinta-alaa.
Kasvihuoneilmiö nykypäivän ihmisen näkökulmasta on tosiasia ja ilmastokatastrofi on edessämme. Ihan näistä lähtökohdosta halusin lukea scifin mestarin tuotoksen fiktiivisesta näkökulmasta kirjoitettuna. Ilman asiaan liittyvää perehtyneisyyttä kirjassa esitetyt tieteelliset selitykset tulvalle tuntuivat mielestäni uskottavilta ja täysin mahdollisilta. Seikkailun viehättävyyttä ei laskenut yhtään se että tietyt seikat painottuivat tutkijoiden analyyseihin ja teorioihin.

Mats

Compelling premise and characters, but I would have liked to see a more thoughtful exploration of the human societies that emerged as the floodwaters rose than "everyone sucks now except an american oligarch and military, especially those nasty asians".

Yolanda Sfetsos

I have to admit that this is the first Stephen Baxter book I've read, but I can certainly say that it won't be the last. If I had to sum up this book in one word, I would have to say: epic. Okay, maybe I would use two words: epic and wow. Seriously, this is a thick book packed with a story that spans many, many years. And you know what? Every page mattered, and not once did I get tired of reading, or lose focus.

I was pretty much hooked from the very beginning. Who wouldn't be? As soon as I read the blurb, I knew it was a book I'd be interested in. And I wasn't wrong.

It's 2016. Lily, Gary, Helen, and Piers are four hostages who have been kept in captivity in Spain for five years. Passed around from one group to another and treated worse than animals, they've endured an imprisonment most wouldn't survive. The day they're finally released -- by the owner of AxysCorp, Nathan Lammockson -- and return to England, also happens to be when the flood starts. Out of nowhere, sea levels rise at alarming rates and begin to submerge the coastline of most continents almost instantly. Driving people farther inland, searching for higher ground. Of course, that means that a lot of the world's population suddenly becomes refugees and border patrols are set up everywhere to keep people in, or out.

As the water continues to rise and humans try to find a way to explain or beat the flood, chaos takes over every corner of the world. And countries start to disappear. I was horrified when I read about what happens to Sydney. :(

The story is told in the POV of several characters, to help us keep up with the hostages as they travel all over the world. But I also liked a character called, Thandie Jones. She's the only one who found a tangible reason for this event. Also the only one able to provide some sort of answer that didn't revolve around global warming. But the central character is always Lily. A woman who tries to connect to her younger sister and kids, but somehow always manages to feel closer to her fellow hostage survivors and never loses her ties to Nathan Lammockson. A ruthless man who is very determined to be the saviour of the world and embarks on several ideas he believes will save mankind. Like the Ark 3, which he models after the Queen Mary.

When the hostages were released, they made a promise to keep in touch and look after each other, especially Helen's daughter, who was born during their dark days of captivity. Something that Lily follows to the end, and I think will carry on into the next book.

I totally lost myself in this book. In the catastrophic events that unfold, the nightmarish situations that worsened with every chapter. It was scary, horrific, and depressing... but at the same time, resilient. A very strong story that captured the spirit of humanity in a race for survival, peppered with shaky and complicated relationships. When the ocean rises as fast as it does in this post-apocalyptic world, what can you really do to beat it? I found myself wondering about that often enough, and was horrified to see where it led the survivors.

The global maps at the beginning of each part were also a very cool addition. I liked being able to keep up with the horror of what these subterranean oceans breaking through onto the earth were doing to the planet.

Flood is a truly amazing experience. The descriptions so vivid that I could see everything playing out inside my head. Stephen Baxter does a fine job at blending in lots of scientific facts with the human condition. The science balanced out the human struggle, and vice versa.

This is a truly sad and touching story of a bleak future for a planet that we so often take for granted, and not treat as well as we should. It's a story that'll stay with me for years to come. I can't wait to read the next one, Ark.

The Cats’ Mother

I bought this because the sequel, Ark, came to through book club and has been on the shelf for ages, because I can’t bear to read series out of order. It took a while though, because the leading reviews on here are all terrible. Finally, I had a voucher to use up and figured i’d give it a go. I ended up really enjoying it. I definitely like the post-apocalyptic genre, but most of the examples I have read have had supernatural or paranormal elements, or been set so far into the future as to seem unrealistic. This was published in 2008, with the story beginning in 2016 (last year, just), so it all felt very plausible.

Lily, the central character, a USAF pilot, has been kept hostage by a series of terrorist groups in Spain for five years when she and a small number of other Brits and Americans are rescued by soldiers working for a megalomaniac billionaire, Nathan Lammockson. Taken Home to London, and vowing to stay in touch, they witness the first of a series of global flooding events. Initially Lily’s main concern is reuniting with and then protecting her sister’s family, but she ends up working with a group of scientists attempting to determine the cause of the rapidly rising sea level. The story covers the next 40 odd years as country after country is drowned with the inevitable worsening refugee crisis, and human awfulness that follows.

You know from the start that this is not going to have a happy ending, although I knew that the next book is about the space voyage to try and save the human race (and presumably other species too) by finding a new planet. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, and had not read anything by this author before, and I think most of the rather mean-spirited negative reviews on GR are from people expecting a sci-fi novel as that’s what the author normally writes. While there are some valid criticisms (what about all the world’s cruise ships? Why did the last part have to drag on so long?) I thought this was a clever and original story, thought-provoking and scary in equal measure.

Dave

It starts out as almost a fantasy as flood waters the world over start to rise. Each major section of the book starts with a map showing the changes to the world as the sea level creeps up and up. But the science it, as is typical of Baxter, quite real, quite believable and all rather scary.

Baxter's fascination with evolution and adaptation comes to the fore here. The book covers aroiund 35 years and three generations of people and the changes he imagines are all too realistic. His depiction of how various human societies struggle against the tides and all ultimately collapse on each other as the land runs out is both imaginative and yes all too real. The fate of Tibet in particular, as it is flooded with refugees from all sides, is particularly grizzly.

There is a beautifully written scene as the very tip of Mt Everest vanishes below the waves.

All in all this is an enjoyable yarn with some interesting science and a few lessons in there for all of us to act now and not let global warming run away from us all.

Nina

The science is there, but the fiction could have been better. The pacing is often too slow. And some plots which were explored at length previously reach a conclusion in just a sentence, like the author suddenly remembered he had to wrap that up, but was more interested in the rest that was currently going on. I also felt conflicted by how at first this book seemed like it could have been straight out of reality, but near the end it grew far more fantastical. Still, that's fiction for you, I guess?

I did in the end enjoy the science that this book explores, what would happen if there were vast pockets of water below the earth surface and they burst open, and how the world would change under the effect of that. You can tell the author did his homework there. But in the end, I think the book suffers for being too science-y, where I feel it would have been improved if the story-writing had been given as much attention. Was however good enough to see it through to the conclusion.

Mitchell

This book was suggested as a candidate for the Powells SF group. Phil found it unreadable which is unheard of a for a apocalyptic book - though to be fair she prefers post-apocalyptic. I found it a bit of a slow read. The premise was interesting if unbelievable. It would be an okay book to discuss except for the people who would refuse to finish it. 4 of 5.

Agnes

Good idea but the book would be much better with 200 page less. This way was just boring.

Richard Buro

The short version first . . .

Apocalyptic visions of a future Earth are one of the sub-genres of science fiction, and probably one which has seen a variety of ways in which the Earth can be destroyed or so physically changed that we cannot imagine how life can ever come back to the “bald prairie” or the “totally water world” that are two of the rather inventive ways in which the Earth has been previously destroyed based on our various metaphysical / religious texts that are available and translated into virtually every language that exists on our planet today. Those of the Judeo-Christian faith normally refer to the flood that occurred during the time of Noah. The rain occurred for forty days and forty nights per the texts. The result was a planet covered in water which slowly began receding after the forty days and nights of rain, the hardest rain anyone had ever experienced. In
Flood, author
Mr. Stephen Baxter shows what might occur in the modern and near future if climatic and other changes bring about a second Deluge, in some ways similar to Noah’s experience, and in some ways very different. Let’s take a look at these similarities and differences as a means of reviewing
Mr. Baxter’s work first published in 2008 by Gollanz, with the edition I read being published 11 months later in hard cover by Roc Publishing.

The first similarity is man’s lack of stewardship of resources. In Noah’s time, men were usually hard working and striving to better themselves, while providing for their families. Naturally as things seem to happen with humans involved, there came a growing level of dissent and bickering about worldly things with the spiritual falling by the wayside. With man’s move away from religious observance and teachings, God became concerned, driving Him to act according to what His Children were doing and what must become of their lack of following in His Path. The result was to have Noah, a truly God-fearing, believing man, who followed God’s desire and built a boat for Noah and his family as well as two of every animal and beast on the Earth. Aa the story goes, Noah worked on building his Ark by God’s design and plan, and at the proper time, animals came in pairs to enter the Ark and as the rain began, it would be closed, and the incessant rains would begin. As the story goes, rains occurred for 40 days and 40 nights, and after the rains stopped, in due course, they found a dry spot of ground to beach their Ark, and by direction, they let out their livestock, families, and received a Covenant from God via a rainbow in the sky with directions on what would happen in case there was a recurrence of their wickedness. The rainbow was added to the visual reminders of God’s Presence and Dominion over the Earth. The other reminder was that the Earth would never be destroyed by water again, but rather by fire.

Mr. Baxter’s view of stewardship is brought to the fore in several places, in subtlety and inference, but the exist nonetheless. Let’s see how that works . . . There are numerous references to the trash and detritus of man and his dependence on petroleum to make plastics, solvents, paints, lubricants, and a plethora of other items for the convenience of man. Of course, as one reads
Flood, it becomes abundantly clear that there is a certain degree of environmental damage that is caused by these petroleum based products and the remnants which will outlive us as well as their precursors outlived the last dominant species on Earth, the dinosaurs.

Mr. Baxter is probably one of the better known of “hard science” fiction’s authors writing today. His research into topics relevant to his writing is clear as he mentioned in
Flood’s After Word where he documented the topics of mantle based water caches which exceed the volume of the water in today’s oceans, something with which I was unfamiliar. His story-telling skills are impeccable with its relentless rush and push as irresistible as the flood’s waters advance over the land, raising rivers and lakes beyond their capacities. The climatological sturm and drang comes through clearly as well as the expected use of nuclear weapons in some of the final outposts of Man in the areas of South and Central Asia. There were also instances of almost Gulag or concentration camp locations where immigrants leaving flooded lower lands would be placed indefinitely, with some of the locations being both denuded of everything except the residual radiation of the fallout from the nuclear holocaust, limited though the exchanges were. In the final vestiges of dryland, it became a struggle to find enough places for all to fit. Naturally, not all would, and the development of what another author
Dale Brown calls a certain type of satellite that could be launched when a military operation needs it right this second, the so-called need it right this second or (NIRTS). With special handling and a special type of launch aircraft, these little beauties were able to all that was asked of them and more. Similarly, the needs of this second in
Flood included ways to get people to longer term settings where they would be relatively safe and secure.

The final analysis though came about a hundred years into the Flood. That was when the last of the land succumbed to the incessant lapping of the waters over, under, and through it.
Mr. Baxter gets you to the end of the rollercoaster rides through it all, all over the world, and without exception, extinction of land-based animals and plants was occurring on a massive scale especially at the end of the book. Some young humans were learning how to be amphibious to a degree, at home on a solid surface or in the water, regardless. Their persistence, resilience, and their dogged determination would serve them well as they began the transition from human, to amphibian, to water dweller, to who knows . . . ???

Recommendations:

Flood is a longer book, at just under 500 pages, but its length is needed to tell the stories and provide a basis for its sequel,
Ark. There are clear cases of murder, tragic loss of many people at once, destruction on a massive scale, and occasional language less than 1% of all words might be considered questionable or borderline. Within their context, they are mild compared to what others would consider acceptable. Mature middle schoolers and high schoolers should be able to understand and be entertained by the goings on. It is fast paced with lots of action. The style is punchy, and, at time, approaches break-neck speeds. My four-star rating suggests that I am not sanguine with Earth becoming a totally water world without any day land whatsoever. I believe my lack of adventure-some-ness, is my failing, certainly not the readers’ nor the author’s. At any rate, be sure to wear your hip-waders just in case things happen as you read this one!!!!

Review of Stephen Baxter's Flood by
Richard W. Buro is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6374994-flood.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at
http://www.penguin.com/subrights/.

Rodeweeks

A slow story spanning many years with very little building of tension. That said - in my humble opinion it is a science fiction masterpiece. An end of the world kind of story where the whole planet is flooded and very little people survive. Very interesting for me is the biblical references, especially where God promised that He will never punish by flooding again and how the survivors interpret this as not God's fault but that of humankind. Another reference is where Ark 1 is not referred to as an ark but rather as 'Nimrod' - so in the Bible God saved humanity by way of the ark but here with the Nimrod humanity saves itself and thereby challenges God - and 'why the hell not?' as one of the characters said. Humans do have an amazing ability to handle crisis (as is also seen by the way we are handling the current pandemic) - many may die but there is always someone trying something to hopefully survive. I've always wondered about the part in the Bible where God confused the languages because of the building of the Tower of Babel - what would have happened if the languages did not get confused...? and think about it - today we do not care how many languages there is, we find ways to work together all over the world (even as we hate each other's guts). One thing I don't understand about the book (and it might be because I don't understand the science as much as I enjoyed the story) is how humans survive without oxygen - there is a lot of talk about CO2 and as far as I know we cannot breath that. So if the whole planet, including the highest point - Mt Everest, is under water - how do we breath? Anyway, I've enjoyed this book (to the point of getting scared when I see it's raining - lol) and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel

Title	:	Flood (Flood, #1)
Author	:	Stephen Baxter
Rating	:
ISBN	:	0575080566
ISBN-10	:	9780575080560
Language	:	English
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	536
Publication	:	First published July 17, 2008

Flood (Flood, #1) by Stephen Baxter

Flood (Flood, #1) Reviews

Flood (Flood, #1) Reviews

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