�ϻ�����Ӯ����

Cover blurb:

Four hostages are rescued from a group of religious extremists in Barcelona. After five years of being held captive together, they make a vow to always watch out for one another. but they never expected this...

The world they have returned to has been transformed - by water. And the water is rising.

As the water continues to flow from the earth's mantle, entire countries disappear. High ground becomes a precious commodity. And finally the dreadful truth is known: Before fifty years have passed, there will be nowhere left to run...

I have finished the book. But it's still early in the month, so I'll just give no-spoiler first impression for now. I thought the initial drama of the hostages and their rescue was a really strong hook, and it pulled me quickly into the story.

I read that blurb & thought: "Enough water coming up against gravity from the mantle to flood the world? To drown cities as high as Denver would require the equivalent of maybe 4000 ft. [1.2 km] of water from under every square inch of the Earth's surface, including beneath the oceans..."

I'm curious to see how Baxter does that.

It's probably not a spoiler to reveal at this point that the Baxter's flood is more than just the consensus sea level rise predicted from global climate change, and eventually does threaten Denver.

The story spans the globe, and so I think every reader will watch for their own location and height above sea level. Unfortunately, Baxter demonstrates a geographic bias towards England, that I was unable to follow. I just don't know the names of individual roads and buildings in London, or small towns in the English countryside. At the same time, he seems to have some fuzziness about other areas. In Chapter 42, at a time when the sea level is about 50m above 2010 datum, Baxter writes:

"But there was also a gathering refugee crisis in Canada, as Hudson Bay spread inexorably wider, and the sea forced its way down the throat of the Saint Lawrence valley toward the Great Lakes, drowning Quebec and Montreal and Toronto. Elena said there was another extinction event going on there. The lakes were the largest bodies of fresh water on Earth: now their ecologies were poisoned by salt."

The problem is that Lake Ontario, where Toronto is, is at 75m, and while some extreme tidal actions might bring salt water up into it, there is no way the other Great Lakes would be inundated. Lake Erie is above Niagara Falls, at 174m. Lake Huron and Lake Michigan are at 176m, and Lake Superior is at 183m. Baxter might have noted that the seaports of Cleveland, Detroit, Duluth, Milwaukee, and Chicago would remain unflooded until much later in the story.

While I do appreciate the way the book takes some time for the scientific reality of flooding to emerge from accepted global climate change data, just as it has taken some time for the reality of global climate change to emerge for accepted natural climate variation, I feel that the science of huge reserves of water in the Earth's mantle and suddenly released is pretty far-fetched. Really, this is just a ploy that allows Baxter to push his characters around from disaster to disaster as eventually the entire Earth succumbs. The narrative does sometime skip forward years at a time, as the overall flooding takes something like 50 years.

The one character who drives the survival of the main characters is portrayed as a somewhat obsessed misanthrope. But then, maybe that's what it would take for a population to last through the experiences in this book. However, the main character plays along, as she must to survive, and I found her to be totally sympathetic. All in all, I give this a medium rating, for adequate entertainment, but nothing too special.

I finally finished the book. I agree the science wasn't so convincing. In the Afterword, Baxter gives some scientific evidence that isn't inconsistent with the plot, but doesn't really present a case for the possibility of such an event.

A not-very-well explained (scientific or otherwise) disaster of humans (and all land-based life) spiraling down towards extinction isn't high in my reading priorities. I'm not sure whether the book ending before we learn the final conclusion makes it more or less appealing.

There is a sequel, Ark, that I assume is about the space ship that launches in the periphery of this story. I might read it...

Good, strong start, but as the background science and ingenuity of the survivors got weakener, so did the plot.

Wow, this is the first time in months that I've finished one of our books within the month we were supposedly reading it. I hit that last page with two hours to go :-)

My review, below. If you like it, please click through and hit that “like” button to make me feel better about finishing this doorstop?

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.

(Like? Click through.)

One other issue with Flood: In the book, as scientists try to understand the rising waters, most scientists refuse to stop clinging to climate change explanations. That may be realistic - scientists (especially older ones) don't give up old theories as quickly as they should in a perfect world. However, in the context of the real world's dangers of climate change and the nonsense of today's climate change deniers, a portrait of climate change being wrong and scientists being unwilling to see climate change as wrong - that rubbed me the wrong way. That dissonance wasn't improved by Baxter's unlikely "true" explanation for the rising waters.

I don't mean this is a literary flaw, but content in fiction can still be distasteful to readers.

Hmm, I didn't have that reaction. The way I see it, Baxter never said climate change was wrong — throughout the book the characters were still discussing increasing CO2 levels and how they would interact with the flood.

So those scientists were effectively in the same camp I was in as a reader. “Climate change is enough of a problem. Are you really saying there is another problem, even worse? Yeah, right.”

After all, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” , and Thandie’s evidence really wasn’t up to the task yet, and events precluded the accumulation of confirming research. That scientists would be very slow to come around to share her conclusion is, I think, very realistic.

True, Baxter didn't say "climate change is a figment of the imagination and nothing more". I'd be surprised if Baxter thought that. My concern was the possible effect on the average reader. They've heard this climate change denier nonsense. They don't read scientific publications to get the truth. Then they read Baxter showing scientists as close-minded and trying to apply climate change theories to a situation where it doesn't apply...

Sarah Palin didn't literally say "Shoot Gilfords" and she may not have wanted it to happen, but...

Well, consider the audience, though. I mean, the "average reader" simply doesn't do hard scifi.

Maybe the climate change deniers have made me over-defensive of climate change.

After the sea level rise exceeded the worst case climate change effect (total melt of polar ice) it should have been obvious to everyone that this was something additional. Baxter is basing his concept on the release of reservoirs of water from the Earth's mantle. There actually is some new and tentative science behind this. Here's an article . I'm not an expert on geology, but I thought the rapid release of that water was the part that seemed far-fetched. And even so, the amount of water was MORE yet.

Tomhl wrote: "After the sea level rise exceeded the worst case climate change effect (total melt of polar ice) it should have been obvious to everyone that this was something additional."

Not necessarily. What is crucial is that the prior models, just using climate change, were based on known science and seemed to be adequate to the task. Even when empirical data went beyond what those models predicted, it remained more rational to assume they had made mistakes in their models than to switch to completely new theories. After all, the underlying theory wasn't being invalidated.

This is what Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions tells is would happen. And it is critical to note that this can only be appraised in retrospect: scientific "revolutions" that failed aren't visible on the radar. Radical theories are a dime a dozen, and almost all of them end up being wrong.


Tomhl wrote: "Baxter is basing his concept on the release of reservoirs of water from the Earth's mantle. There actually is some new and tentative science behind this. Here's an article ... I'm not an expert on geology, but I thought the rapid release of that water was the part that seemed far-fetched."

Yeah, I believe he points to similar data in his endnote. But the problem isn't just with the rapid release — any substantial release is implausible on empirical grounds. I heard on a science podcast that one of the reasons scientists think much of the water in the oceans is from comets is because the ratio of hydrogen isotopes of the oceans is somewhere between that of mantle water and that of comet ice.

If the water in the mantle had exchanged significantly with ocean water, this wouldn't be the case. Plus, I suspect mantle water would be saltier, right? So if we haven't had a dramatic mantle dehydration in the past, what on earth would make anyone think we would have one now?


I think Baxter should have use a flood basalt event instead. It would have required a much longer story line, but if long-term rising sea levels put enough weight on the mantle, they could have triggered such an event, giving him an extinction level event more plausibly tied to human activity.

Maybe someone else will write that one. :-)

I agree with your comments, David. I got the same uneasy feeling reading this. I think it's because we get inudated with so much propaganda these days, we get really sensitized to it, and it's not fun to read something that smacks of that same kind of messaging, even if it wasn't the writer's intent.

I had other questions about the practicalities of Baxter's Flood. ("Questions" I lack the geology for confident answers.) The water was coming up from the mantle at deep sea bottoms. With no indications to the contrary, it sounds like water is coming out of deep caverns and (especially as more of the Earth is covered with water) there's no way for the caverns to be filled with air. It would seem a vacuum should result. That would make it harder for more water to leave the caverns (especially with gravity also trying to pull the ocean water down the vents to the caverns)...

Large reservoirs behind dams in Egypt and China have triggered earthquakes. An inundation like this should have resulted in settling over the formations out of which the water gushed/squeezed/whatever.

A longer time line, of course, deprives Baxter of his core cast.

It seemed odd that of all the nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers--not to mention cruise ships and yachts--only one sub survived more than a few years. (Of course, a ship built in the Andes by amateurs fell apart rapidly.)

I know I'm very late, but I am still thinking about this.

First of all, despite myself, I was very affected by the book. In a sort of 'end is nigh' way. Especially seeing as I live in Brisbane, Queensland (Australia) whihc was suffering extreme flooding at the time I read the book.

I've had quite a few thoughts imagining my children living on rafts in a waterworld etc. They swim quite well so all good.

I am tortured by the implausibility as I see it of the science. HOw could the earth contain that much water? Surely if it did, and then it all somehow drained 'up', the mantle would crumble. How could that volume of water even be contained within the mantle? etc

HOw could people live that way, wouldn't they get scurvy, etc etc. It all seems most improbable.

I don';t think I liked a single one of the characters.

And finally, I was tortured, absolutely tortured, by hte disappearance of hte baby. I had just had a baby when I read the book, and I found it very depressing that Baxter so casually inserted this plot device, that the other characters treated the abduction of the baby so casually, and finally that the readers presumably treat it so casually (and aren't forced to flick to the the middle of the book to find out what happens to the baby, etc).

Despite the above, I enjoyed it! And I will definitely read the sequel!

You hardly had time to write a book review, going through that flood in Brisbane! Now all my excuses will sound lame. I hope you and your family are doing ok now. I imagine there is a lot of clean-up and rebuilding still to come for Qld.

I agree with you about the baby. It seems to happen quite a lot in books and movies, that babies can just get passed around and not seem to notice. Anyone who has been around a baby knows that such a scenario would be absolutely devastating for a little one. They know who their people are, and don't like to be separated from them. And of course it's all the more horrible because they cannot express their very real feelings in words.

Maybe that is one of the reasons the characters in this book feel so poorly sketched out to me. But yes, I will probably read the sequel too. Having spent time on this book, I found the ideas brought up at the end enough to keep on going.

I agree, Angela. There seemed to be no conception of how traumatic that scenario would be. And then the mother turning up to formal occasions and so on a few days later?! Very unlikely. I was also tortured wondering how the baby was being fed? has baxter forgotten we are mammals?

By the way, excuse my numerous typos in my previous post - typing was encumbered by children. We are all okay re the flooding - thanks for asking. The city is returning to itself.

Way too many people forget we are mammals nowadays! But I know what you mean - I always wonder about such details myself.

I'm glad to hear Brisbane is returning to itself. It is such a nice city.