Flood by Stephen Baxter is not what you would first expect. I expected something a bit like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital books and that is not quite what you get when read Flood, it’s a bit more sci-fi than that.
One of the most intriguing aspects of his story is the back-story of the leading characters. They start out as hostages living through a several year long hellish existence at the hand of their captors. After being saved we then follow them and their friends and families around the globe as the flooding starts wreaking havoc on life as we know it. Baxter’s depiction on how major cities of the world are affected is detailed and really gets you involved in the story, at least if you are familiar with them. The later chapters showing how the next generation treats the transformed world as something normal, already adapting to it, and showing almost no interest in stories of what it used to be like is almost scary.
Apart from some near-future tech which seems to be within our reach we unfortunately get to know very little about the really science fictiony stuff in the story . We’ll have to wait for the coming sequel Ark for that part of the story I guess. Looking forward to it myself!
I’ve been a Baxter fan for quite some time and looks like I’ll continue to be one; Flood gets a rating of 4 stars out of 5 from me.