Flood

No cover

Stephen Baxter: Flood (2008, Gollancz)

473 pages

English language

Published Oct. 19, 2008 by Gollancz.

ISBN:
978-0-575-08058-4
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OCLC Number:
219991463

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3 stars (13 reviews)

The seas are rising. At first global warming is blamed, but as London, then New York, then entire countries disappear beneath the waves, it is clear that something much worse is happening.

11 editions

Review of 'Flood' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Interesting story - imagine some source of large amounts of water buried under the crust which, fo reasons no one understands, suddenly bursts through to the surface and floods the Earth under about a kilometer of water. People get together, countries break down, oligarchs build special ships, and other people build rafts.
Some parts were too fantastic to be believable. In London, they only worry about sewage pollution when Greenwich flood barrier is overwhelmed, whereas we in the real UK suffer from sewage pollution after light rain due to lack of investment. I also thought the Middle East would be nuked long before it happens in the book, as each religion fights over Jerusalem.

Review of 'Flood (Flood, #1)' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

What if the waters just kept rising and rising?

That's the basic premise of this book. Stephen Baxter avoids the politically treacherous ground of global warming and simply goes for pockets of water under the crust that are somehow released causing escalating flooding.

It's a very simple idea and the early part of the book which is set round about now plays heavily on familiarity first by showing the effects of a relatively modest sea level rise on London and then later the effect of a more substantial rise on New York.

These are places that everyone "knows" so it's easy to connect. It's also why pretty much every disaster movie uses these locations. And that's what the early sections read like too. But since this is Stephen Baxter it's only a matter of time before the science starts to come through.

And as the story evolves it becomes more …

Review of 'Flood (Flood, #1)' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I actually stopped reading about 120 pages in, which is rare for me. This book is basically an interesting thought experiment loosely framed as a novel. The characters could not be more forgettable and less developed. I got the idea Mr. Baxter knows the science backwards and forwards, but as a story, this was just painful, basically just meteorological conjecture punctuated with British place names and cardboard characters. Life's too short.

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Subjects

  • Floods -- Fiction
  • Climatic changes -- Fiction
  • End of the world -- Fiction