Flood [Mass Market Paperback]

Before I began reading this book I was concerned it may be another "the sky is warming, the sky is warming!", greenhouse gas caused disaster novel. One cannot judge a book by its cover however, and I decided to push through. I was pleasantly surprised at the different concept Baxter uses to flood the earth. The book opens in Barcelona where we meet several of the main characters who will we follow through their adventures to survive. I never really understood exactly why these people are hostages. Their backgrounds are rather random from a hostage-takers point of view. Shortly after the introduction of the hostages a rich, visionary mogul appears on the scene with an inexplicable interest in them. Ostensibly its a publicity stunt, but he continues to take an interest in them despite outliving their usefulness to him which seems completely out of character. As others have said, the characters here are rather 2-dimensional and incongruously placed. For instance, one of the main characters is a USAF chopper pilot, suddenly she's piloting submarines, and part of the inner circle to the rich mogul. She is allowed a dizzying array of privileges with no real explanation. The backdrop of the global flood is interesting but the descriptions contained here read rather like a topography lesson than a human tragedy. London and the surrounding areas of Britain are listed off, a litany of locations largely unfamiliar to anyone who hasn't spent much time in the area. The same goes for scenes in New York. Much of the story describes the lead up to climactic events then cuts away from the scene to resume a couple of years later. The result keeps the reader on edge but never really satisfies. Overall I thought the first 60% of the book was very disjoint and frustrating whereas the second half of the book picked up speed and kept me interested. I think I will probably read the sequel to try to get some closure. Flood is ok, but not great.

There were many things I liked about the peri-apocalyptic "Flood" by Stephen Baxter, and also a few things that I didn't. The main plot line revolves around a sudden planet-wide increase in the sea level. First by a meter or two and then during the next 40 years, at an exponential rate that results in a situation that the most dire current global warming alarmists would shrug off as impossible. Great idea. Excellent execution. But as others have commented, the character development was weak. I disagree (with a previous reviewer who claimed) that people read hard SF for the science fiction aspects and are willing to accept poorly developed characters and a lack of real emotional interaction and human interest. The best writers in all genres combine plotting, excitement, new ideas and problem solving with character development, and Baxter has done so in the past. Not here however.

I was (despite the fact that I am a firm believer in the reality of global warming albeit not completely convinced that it is all man-made) delighted to see a sea level rise disaster scenario that DID NOT put all the blame on atmospheric CO2 and global warming. Baxter's mechanism for the sea level rise was novel, and I found the maps of how our current world map would change following different increases in sea level fascinating.

Since there was nothing that anyone could do about the problem itself, the plot was about how governments, corporations, families and individuals coped with the ever-encroaching sea. These parts of the story were well thought out and sped by.

There were also plot holes - some big enough to drive the Queen Mary through. Chief among them was the seeming miraculous ability of billionaire Nathan Lamockson to get huge engineering projects done with much of the world's land mass underwater and thus with massive disruptions of our manufacturing ability destroyed. This troubled me right through to the end of the book, which is a lead-in to the sequel ("Ark") that was published last year in the UK and is now available in hardcover in the US.

In summary, Flood was a sort of atypical peri-/post-apocalyptic novel - the apocalypse takes 40 years from start to finish, there is relatively little in the way of political interactions at any level, and there is almost no post-apocalyptic timeline. But this last, of course, is presumably the subject of Ark. Flood wasn't bad, just not great (for great Baxter see, "The Time Ships", "Rift", "Moonseed", and or :Flux" to name but a few), and I have higher hopes for the sequel.

J.M. Tepper

This is one of the better end-of-civilization novels, up there with "Day of the Triffids" and "The Stand," but grimmer than either because it depicts a destruction more total and a hope even slimmer. I won't give away the end scenario except to suggest Gericault's famous painting would be an apt illustration for it.

The main characters are not particularly heroic, and their antagonists are not particularly villainous, at least in intention. That makes the story all the more believable.

I've read a number of Baxter's novels, but I found this one the most engrossing, and it hasn't yet left my thoughts in the two weeks snce I finished it.