Thursday, June 18, 2009

Flood

I've tended to like Stephen Baxter's science fiction. He tends to go for truly epic scales and events. I particularly liked his Xeelee Sequence, which details a multi-millennium year long saga about the fate of the Universe. His most recent book is called simply Flood.

It's a bit odd. It starts off as what appears to be a global warming tale, what with rising seas, but then the seas keep rising. They rise far more than predicted by the global warming models. The characters feel a bit incidental, and are certainly uninteresting. Here Baxter appears to want to show how the world would react to a extraordinary crisis. For a novel about a world threatening crisis, the human element feels a bit lost as well. This is no The Road, to be sure. I think it is really best for disaster fans, but they might think it a bit slow and wordy.

Here, Baxter reviews a wide range of books and movies about the flooding of London. Worth your time.

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