Ark is a 2009 hard science fiction novel by English author Stephen Baxter. It is a sequel to his 2008 novel Flood. Ark deals with the journey of the starship Ark One, and the continuing human struggle for survival on Earth after the catastrophic events of Flood. The series continues in three pendant stories, which are described in the plot summary below.
Being hard SF, Ark contains many references to unrealised or hypothesised technology (Project Orion, the Alcubierre drive), physics (antimatter), and hypotheses about extraterrestrial life. Baxter credits several books and academic works in an afterword: See Scientific background below.
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.
This isn't precisely a sequel to Stephen Baxter's book Flood because it's not a simple continuation. Or at least that's not all it is. In Flood the world is gradually covered (completely) in water and we get to see how humanity struggles with that. Here in Ark we first get an overlap where we see how the Ark project came about and then we move with it into space with occasional touch backs to Earth.
We deal with primarily new characters here, with only a few exceptions and where Flood tended to jump all around the world and give us a huge array of locations and events, Ark is much more focussed. It is once again spread out over the decades, but the majority of the book is spent with the crew in the Ark and that anchors the book better than Flood was I think.
Science is never far …
This isn't precisely a sequel to Stephen Baxter's book Flood because it's not a simple continuation. Or at least that's not all it is. In Flood the world is gradually covered (completely) in water and we get to see how humanity struggles with that. Here in Ark we first get an overlap where we see how the Ark project came about and then we move with it into space with occasional touch backs to Earth.
We deal with primarily new characters here, with only a few exceptions and where Flood tended to jump all around the world and give us a huge array of locations and events, Ark is much more focussed. It is once again spread out over the decades, but the majority of the book is spent with the crew in the Ark and that anchors the book better than Flood was I think.
Science is never far removed in a Stephen Baxter book of course and on several occasions characters stop to lecture on one topic or another. Fortunately the set up here means it doesn't derail the plot too much.
The other thing that Baxter seems fond off in both this book and Flood (and in previous things of his I've read) is the notion that the human race is extremely adaptable. We see successive generations adapting both their language and behavior to the environment that surrounds them. The effect seems a little too rapid to me, but I buy into the fundamental notion that both culture and physiology will adapt if given time.
Unlike many who write about his sort of scenario Baxter's view of human nature is pretty brutal. We get to see all the worst of humanity on display over the course of the book and people get away with horrible things because fundamentally survival is all that really matters. Whether that survival takes the form of Earth 2, Earth 3, Ark 2 or the rafts on the surface, the drive is simply to endure and continue.
That makes the politicking that goes on on Ark 1 very interesting to observe if not exactly cheerful. But in the end Baxter does provide us with some hope. Along with a lot of unanswered questions. And for a book like this, that makes sense, because it's not really the story of any particular group of people. It's the story of humanity.
