Review of Flood . . . Posted 08 December, 2008

Flood by Stephen Baxter Gollancz, 978-057508-058-4, Sep 2008 Reviewed by Douglas A. Van Belle Book reviews index

As with much of the best science fiction, Flood is built upon a foundation of real science. Stephen Baxter starts with the fact that seismologists have found some rather extensive squishy places (sorry for the technical jargon) in the mantle that could be huge pockets of water. He connects that to some persistently anomalous salinity measurements along the mid-Atlantic ridge and postulates that all that maybe water in the mantle is now being vented into the ocean. From there he weaves a set of stories about a relentless flood that slowly drowns the world.

Flood is one of Baxter's better novels, so his fans should love it, but it's a little harder to say if the average sci-fi reader will like it. For most of sci-fi's occasionally-washed masses, the appeal of Baxter's books tends to be a bit unpredictable. For example: After thoroughly enjoying Manifold Space, I remember stepping onto a transpacific flight with a spring in my step and Mammoth in my hand. An hour into the 73-hour flight, I was confronted by the very tough choice of finishing the book or asking the nice rugby player sitting next to me, to beat me unconscious with it. However, the spychologist who debriefed me when I emerged from the coma considered anyone who disliked Mammoth to be a potential danger to himself and others. That wasn't what she put in the paperwork, but it was obvious.

As with Baxter's other books, your response to Flood will depend on what you love or loathe in our gloriously imperfect the genre. If you like complex, character-driven plots, or anything with a vampire in it, you'll absolutely hate Flood. Baxter teases the reader with an intriguing initial set up, but he never takes advantage of the myriad of opportunities it offers to put some character into his characters. Instead, the characters in Flood drift passively through the scenes and situations created by the flood. However, in an odd way, that is part of the appeal. Flood is for readers who like to dream and speculate beyond the story as they read. As Baxter's matchstick characters float through, the reader can't help but wonder and wander through all the possibilities around and beyond what is written. Perhaps it is the Pacific Island culture of New Zealand, but I kept wondering why it took so long for people to take to the ever-growing sea. And how would the story be different if they did? Baxter's scenes and situations are absolutely perfect for that. They have just enough detail and just enough context to set your mind loose.

A big part of the appeal of sci-fi is getting the reader to think and imagine for themselves, and in that Flood excels, but it could do better with some of the other aspects of story-telling. It fails to deliver anything that will appeal to readers who like conflict, action and adventure. To some degree, I appreciated some of the absence of conflict. As a researcher who studies the social and political responses to disasters I am often frustrated by authors who send Mad Max racing in to loot the orphanage before the dust has settled from the asteroid impact. The less dramatic truth is that, with rare few exceptions, people of all cultures are remarkably cooperative during the initial stages of a disaster and when the flood defences first fail, the initial response Baxter shows us feels spot on to me. However, most of Flood is a slow, long-term kind of catastrophe that grinds the humanity right out of people and that is missing. Baxter doesn't give us is any of the brutality, war and worse that would erupt as people realize that the world is drowning. He hints at some, but it is all off camera, so to speak, and it is also quite modest for people facing the realization of their own extinction. He also skimps on conflict in the literary sense of the term. Even when there is fighting, it doesn't challenge the characters to change or to try to change others.

Hard sci-fi fans need to be ready to endure two niggling problems with the book and I think I have to call them flaws. Baxter forgets or ignores the fact that water is nearly incompressible and the mantle would not have the porous geologic structures of crustal aquifers. Thus if oceans and oceans worth of water were released up and out of the mantle, there would have to be one heck of a lot of something subsiding to replace it. Specifically, for the ocean to rise in relation to the continental land masses, it would have to be continental crust subsiding. If it was ocean crust subsiding, it wouldn't matter, the oceans would get deeper, but their level in relation to the land wouldn't change. It doesn't take much math to figure that for every metre of sea-level rise, continental crust would have to subside by about two and a half and you don't have to be much of a geologist to realize that that would translate into geologic upheaval which should have been far far beyond the biblical proportions of the flood.

The second niggling problem is something that Baxter admits, but that won't make it any less irritating for the hard sci fi crowd. Baxter never offers any explanation for why the flood happens when it does. Few billions years of geologic history where it could have happened at any point, why the second Thursday of February? He admits this problem with a couple of off-hand mentions near the end of the book, but for the hard sci-fi reader the way it's mostly ignored and then not quite handled is irritating.

All books are flawed, all have weaknesses and some have strengths. Flood does have some strengths and that alone sets it apart from many books in the genre, but the Flood's appeal for you will depend on what value you place on the kind of strengths it has in comparison to its shortcomings.



Reviewed by Douglas A. Van Belle