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 More...

Ripping good fiction; mediocre (at best) science fiction--flawed by egregious errors in history, geography and science.

Without giving away too much, it's hard to enumerate where he went wrong. His interpersonal relationships lack credibility. His knowledge of things American is superficial and often wrong. He ignores the thousands of ships and boats--large and small (including a dozen American aircraft carriers, though he creates two British carriers from whole cloth) in his rush to depopulate t More...

Stephen Baxter is a prolific author, and it shows in a number of his works - they are very Clarkian, taking an interesting idea (in this case a vast planet drowning flood) and following it to it's conclusion.

As with many of his books the typical cast of scientists are generally unreflective and fail to present a plausible inner life in response to what is going on around them.

Undoubtedly, as with Clarke, this is because Baxter is more interested in pursuing his idea to it's conclusion, rather th More...

The book I am reviewing is Flood by Stephen Baxter which is an excellent science fiction novel which I bought from Amazon. A long time ago Baxter applied to be an astronaut and didn't pass the selection tests but is doing something almost as good being a science fiction author. He's my favourite sci-fi author and I think his books are very intelligently written. This particular book is about a worldwide flood of cataclysmic proportions. The book was first published in 2008 but starts in 2016 whe More...

ummm...
Okay.
Much of this book I have to say I did not like at all. Too many scientific mumbo jumbo words that left me disconnected to the story. It felt clunky with two pages of a character moving from one side of the street to another. This was mostly in the 1st half of the book. It did get better, and I am glad I stuck with it. Nevertheless, it was HARD to. I was never drawn in. I wanted to know more of the characters and from them. At the end of the book, I got more of that, and it was enou More...

Flood is different to what I expected. The hard science is plausible and the way the events in the novel are spaced gives you a gripping yarn that spans decades. The title gives away the basic plot in that it is about the world being flooded. The characters and vision are what makes the story and gives a strong sound political/social view that is current across the world as we know it. There are strong moral impressions that you find will have you question what you yourself would do in the same More...

Baxter accurately equates the impending sense of dread that would certainly accompany catastrophic oceanic inundation. As mean sea levels rise at an accelerated pace, whole nations are driven to higher ground. This is made personal by accounts of individuals in the thick of migration accentuated by the attendant societal pressures of those whose land is being encroached upon.

The principle shortcoming of "Flood" is that it's simply a narration of global catastrophe, albeit with a ground-level twi More...

It starts out as almost a fantasy as flood waters the world over start to rise. Each major section of the book starts with a map showing the changes to the world as the sea level creeps up and up. But the science it, as is typical of Baxter, quite real, quite believable and all rather scary.

Baxter's fascination with evolution and adaptation comes to the fore here. The book covers aroiund 35 years and three generations of people and the changes he imagines are all too realistic. His depiction of More...

*WARNING: NEEDS EDITING, EXPANSION AND SOME OTHER CHANGES ALSO IT SHOWS HOW SENTIMENTAL AND MELODRAMATIC I CAN BE.READ AT YOUR OWN RISK*
After some deliberation I decided to give this book 5 stars despite its several shortcomings,- because, honestly, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
This will only be a bare bones review, since my time is somewhat limited these past weeks.
First of all- there is the horribly inadequate governmental response to the catastrophe, after all how can every single government on t More...

Flood by Stephen Baxter is a novel about a global catastrophe of Biblical proportions. It follows the fate of political hostages Lily, Helen, her baby Grace, Gary, and Pierce. With the help of the billionaire Nathan Lammockson they were freed in 2016 - just in time to face an even bigger adversary: water. The oceans are rapidly rising (not due to global warming) and it looks like they will continue to rise at an alarming rate. Flood basically chronicles the last years of dry land on the Earth, f More...

And the waters kept rising….. and rising and rising and rising.

Our disparate group of hostage survivors who became bonded to one of the super rich are the prisms through which we watch the ceaseless rising of the waters unfold. A representative enough group but their links to the super rich guy which essentially entails that they are mostly still there at the end seemed a bit stretched.

However, they are our guides to this perplexing catastrophe, to the inundations, floods, panics, mass deaths an More...

As a general rule, I'm a big fan of Stephen Baxter - I think he is, perhaps, one of the best writers of 'Hard' science fiction currently working in the field. And the premise of this series is a promising one; the flooding of the entire earth over a period of fifty or so years, during the near future. THe characters are engaging, there are some intriguing ideas and scenes, and the science driving the story is - as usual with Baxter - fascinating.

But all that aside, to be honest, it's not his be More...

I really wanted to like this book. I really did. I am a huge fan of apocalyptic fiction. On the surface, this book seems to fit the bill. The seas are rising, the earth is flooding - what will humanity do to survive? What's not to like - right? Well, it turns out - quite a bit.

This is the first book in a long time that I have had to force myself to get through. The first 50 pages or so have some flashes of interest, but mostly read like stale and overly long description of geography and topogra More...

I imagine this book happened this way. A group of intelligent science fiction writers were sitting around a table and drinking perhaps a bit too much and they were making a list of the worst science fiction movies of all time. Stephen Baxter who was a little drunk at the time shouts out "Waterworld!" and everyone laughs especially at the fish gilled Kevin Costner character. And seriously where did all that water come from! And then Stephen got a glassy look on his face and said you know what? I More...

Next year. Sea levels begin to rise. The change is far more rapid than any climate change predictions; metres a year. Within two years London, only 15 metres above the sea, is drowned. New York follows, the Pope gives his last address from the Vatican, Mecca disappears beneath the waves. Where is all the water coming from? Scientists estimate that the earth was formed with seas 30 times in volume their current levels. Most of that water was burnt off by the sun but some was locked in the earth's More...

Two stars seems rather harsh for a book that I was able to finish, but going by the good reads guidelines "it was okay". So two stars it is.

A small group of hostages are rescued after years of captivity and find themselves in an unrecognizable world where the oceans are slowly taking over.

Interesting enough premise. Not as preachy as one might imagine. The message of man destroying Mother Earth is there but I don't think it's enough to bother anyone. My problem was the writing itself. The charac More...

I enjoyed this book, though I'm not entirely sure what it really has going for it. At most it's wanting to know how (and if) the characters will survive. Though I can't say I was that strongly affected by pivotal points of (non)survival. And it's not the characters; the really interesting ones are mostly incidental players. That fact that some of the main characters were, at the start of the book, held hostage by terrorists should be important for character/for driving the book. But, really that More...

Flood is your standard end of the world science fiction novel, written by a mathematician/aeroengineer-turned-novelist. Baxter's background in hard science gives the book a strong foundation in engineering, climatology, geology, biology, and even astronomy that is both interesting and accessible.*

Unfortunately, by choosing the hard science route, Baxter sacrifices in character development and plotting. This is the opposite of McCarthy's The Road, in which the reader never knows what happened to More...

Its a full length book but I read it in a day. On the other hand, I was visiting in-laws and had nothing else to do with my time.

Books like this one always make me wonder if I should have a survival pack prepared.

This book, unlike 'books like this one', make me feel that it would be pointless to do. In this book, most of humanity, and most, if not all, terrestrial animals die. The main characters end up with jobs that allow them to view the most noteworthy of the catastrophes and catalog them.

Th More...

I have mixed feelings about this book. I like Baxter and want to like this, but something bothers me about it. It could be the pacing which is slow and without any real building of suspense. I did not identify with any of the characters, nor did I feel a sense of emotional involvement in this apocalyptic novel. But, as it says on the cover, it is relentless. And, that it is.

I am also bothered some by the unbelievability of the size of the flood, at least by the mechanisms explained in the book. More...

I love the premise of the book and much of what I like about Baxter's writing is present here. The novel spans decades and has no-holds-barred approach to the calamity befalling the planet and its people and how they respond.

It's also a typical Baxter book whose characters are interesting but seldom have much depth. As an example, if an important character dies I want to feel it, but I often don't in a Baxter book.

It also, dear reader, drives me nuts, dear reader, how often a character, when spe More...

I enjoy Stephen Baxter's work. He is a writer of "hard" SF that is grounded in real science. This novel presents a fascinating vision of what it might be like if Earth were flooded by subterranean oceans suddenly bubbling up to the surface. I did find, however, that this story was longer than it needed to be. There are only so many ways to say that yet another city, mountain, or continent has slipped beneath the waves. The story follows a small number of people who band together to find ways to More...

This is a well written deeply distrubing view of the future. Chosing to view the story through the eyes of the hostages was brilliant. I think the responses to the rising sea levels mirror what is happening today. The time jumps gave a since of urgency without forcing the story to get boged down in techo babble. Baxter fleshes out each character. Their stories their struggles kept me involved. This one of the few books of this genre I would purchase. Bater aviods reducing this work to the level More...

I find myself seeing the points of reviews that rated this lower, HOWEVER I will say that this is probably the best book that I have read this year. And I would argue that I have read a number of really good books. In fact I would like to give this a higher rating if it was possible.

Baxter is indeed very Clarke-ian and for that I love him. Concept, Sci-fi and story are all well conceptualized, researched and realized. The characters some complain were a bit flat, but the character were well ren More...

I picked up Flood a few years ago, just days before real-life flooding took place in Nashville. And while my family was spared any major damage or direct impact from the flooding, I still knew a lot of people whose lives were impacted by it.

And so it was that this novel languished on my to-be-read shelf for what a couple of years. Finally, a few weeks, it rose to the top of my to-be-read pile and I decided enough time had passed that I decided to pick it up and give it a try.

As with all Stephen More...

i really like Stephen Baxter, so when i saw a new paperback over Xmas i bought it on an impulse.

the premise of the book is very simple: what happens if the Earth's water level rises and keeps rising?

using a narrator who'd been kept hostage for 5 years underground allows Baxter to 'info-dump' successfully - Lily is as bemused and clueless as us, the audience. he then extrapolates the future of humanity, in a drowning world.

this book was far more plot-driven than a character study, sometimes Lily More...

This book was an ok read for me, I read it because I thought it would be like that movie 2012 which it is not, it is much more in greater detail.

The flood however, starts over in Europe and I am sure the European readers could relate to this book better than myself when it comes to knowing their parts of the neighborhoods.

This book showed in a major disaster, how the rich make it out of such an event and the poor of course suffer. This had lots of violence and war in it even in the event . It h More...

I know I am enjoying a book when I actively choose to go to bed early in order to stay awake long enough to read a few pages. This is the only way to defeat my pavlovian response to reading in bed. I also found myself wanting to tell people about the book, so that is always a good sign.

End of the World books are by nature, bleak. Normally I enjoy post-apocalyptic or even apocalyptic adventure novels because you know the heroes will persevere and come out on top, albeit in a very changed world. T More...