Customer Reviews

Flood

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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 must be a first draft Baxter grabbed while fleeing the global flood. Nothing else can account for such a mediocre work. Characters are about as authentic as a Barbie doll, the ever-moving action makes no sense whatsoever, the science is suspect and the reaction of folks is unreal. Where is the emotion???? After blithely being informed that 2 billion people have been killed, we go on to discuss mundane daily activity. Survivors calmly speak of France or Russia disappearing with little concern. Is it tea time yet?

The hostage story was a bust since it was only a trick to gather four disparate people. The reaction to their rescue was eerily "off". Even shocked people should have been at least happy. It would have been a much better technique to follow two or three groups around the globe than trying to keep up with all the various meanderings. I never figured out what they were doing - dashing from Nepal to England to the U.S. And they were all so darn boring - cardboard cutouts of characters.

The idea that no one notices rising sea waters is ludicrous. Even predictions of rising waters makes headlines and that's without an extra millimeter. No one seems to do anything except governments and rich capitalists. One irritating habit is Baxter's continual bitching about plutocrats, corporate barons and the filthy rich while using their wealth as a basis for deliverance. Anyhoo, a corporate zillionaire builds an Arc on dry ground a la Noah. Not a bad idea until you consider the time and effort spent in replicating a plush Queen Mary cruise ship!

Why, with the end apparent, a floating huge city could not be build in 25 years is a mystery. And if they can build a faster-than-light engine in a generation, why not nano transformers that would change water to hard materials? My grade - C-

What a great premise, and what a tedious read. I have read other books by Stephen Baxter (such as Emperor) and enjoyed them. Bottom line on this book is that you don't end up caring for ANY of the characters. Much of the disaster coverage was described by the characters after the fact, instead of being shown to the reader. The book violates the standard practise of "show me, don't tell me" and the results are not worth it. If you'll pardon the pun, I slogged through it to the end, but was disappointed at having spent so much time with so little reward. If you want a better natural-catastrophe-to-end-of-world book, check out Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Flood simply doesn't entertain.

The main characters are supporting actors and do little to make you care about any of them. You can actually skip years in their lives and pages in the book and not miss much. It is an interesting book but it is more procedural than action. It could easily be shorter. The characters have nothing much going for them so the main story and the reason to read it is in finding out how we cope with the flood and what is the result for humanity.

The main concept of this book might work in a quick two hour movie with lots of special effects that don't give you time to evaluate the possibilities of the plot. However, it's not easy to ignore the laws of physics entirely over the course of reading a book. The main protagonists start out with some appeal, but they seem to lose their ability for independent thought almost immediately. The standard response when someone appealed to their sense of morality was "you're an idiot". The detailed descriptions of English geography took a toll on my attention span as well. I admit that I did make it through to the end of the book, but I was relieved when it was over.

Flood

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As an aficionado of disaster novels, I think this is a welcome addition to the genre. The scenario is this: how would we cope if the water levels started rising - and kept rising, and rising and rising...It follows the adventures of a few scientists as they try to save the world and their family from the rising waters. Sometimes I felt the scientific details of the disaster bogged the book down a bit but this is a minor complaint. I could also argue that all the scientific evidence made the scenario more believable.

I admit I approached this book with some trepidation. It had a certain odour about it, but I was in the mood for an apocalyptic SF dosed romp, and this seemed to be the best the shelves had to offer.
Sigh.
Where do I begin? Mostly, it's all be covered by other reviewers. The two-dimensional, cardboard characters, the unnatural attenion given to the former hostages by the super-wealthy industrialist, the fact they were all hostages together in the first place (convenient), the bizarre and irrational reasons for these characters to zip around the world to investigate/witness/dialogue about-disasters that never seem to generate true panic or desperation. I mean, every single land-based species on the planet is going to be in crisis here - where is the urgency? I had major issues with the "science" myself. Why, after having NEVER been completely covered with water during it's entire history, would the earth spontaneously release all these hidden reserves of water and flood the continents? ***SPOILER*** Apparently, it's Gaia - and she's all mad at us for being messy jerks. Wow. All this extrapolated from some possibly pourous rocks that might be under the asian continent. Really? It's almost as if Baxter had a few visual ideas (Oooh, Mt Everest slowly covered by rising oceans! Oooh, a giant Queen Mary floating off from the Andes!) with no coherent method of tying them together, and no logical way for it to even happen.
There are better books out there. Lots of them, in fact.
I have no intention of reading Ark at this point.

You would think that a story about a flood that is going to cover the whole Earth is kind of an exciting story but as the other reviewers said, its very disjointed and not well explained at all. This is a great idea for a story but story itself is as exiting as watching grass grow. I love "end of the world and natural disaster" novels but I can safely say that its one the most boring books I have ever read in my entire life.