Stephen Baxter’s Flood is the most disturbing book I’ve read in a long time. I actually had to take a break for a couple of days last week just to shake off the heebie jeebies. Like the title hints, this book is about a global flood. It’s based on what might happen if all the glaciers and ice caps melt and the earth starts to flood. On top of all this (and this is where the science fiction starts), three reservoirs of water buried underneath the earth’s crust and release enough water to drown even the Andes and the Himalayas. Unbelievable, but Baxter made it so real that when I drove through part of the Wasatch mountains this weekend, I couldn’t help but imagine them covered in salty water and people living in tents and shacks along the ridges.
I guess that’s the point of the book.
Flood begins a few years from now, in 2012, with a group of hostages from the United States and the UK are being held in Barcelona. After their release, the captives promise to keep in touch. This promise gives Baxter the premise he needs to hops around the globe to watch the progress of the flood. While the Americans’ dialog is not all that accurate, the rest of the book just sweeps you along. The book is divided into sections, and the story jumps along by five or ten year increments. It eventually covers three generations.
In the first section, we get to follow the characters around during a massive flood in London. The Thames Barrier gets over topped and the water never goes down. Londoners and other Britons living in low lying areas relocate to higher ground. By halfway through the book, England gets wiped out by a tsunami. Apart from the tsunamis and the London event, it just seems like the waters just keep rising. The characters constantly remark that people are tired of packing up and moving every couple of years. Governments relocate, but after a couple of decades the only one left standing is the American Government, holed up in the Rockies. The Himalayas are the setting for a three way war between Russia, China, and India and there are rumors of cannibalism. The Andes have been colonized by a rich Briton who is building an ark based on the Queen Mary and using local labor with the intent of abandoning them when the waters rise.
The first generation–the hostages’ generation–study the floods and try to preserve as much of their way of old way of life as possible. The second generation don’t know anything but moving and hunger and thirst and desperation. The third generation are used to the water and don’t care about the science. Sic transit gloria mundi, huh? One of the last scenes in this book shows one of those third generation kids watching the top of Mount Everest get covered and not understanding what the big deal is. Baxter puts such detail and pathos into his novel that it’s hard not to imagine yourself standing on one of the rafts floating around in the global sea watching the last bit of solid earth drown. (On a related note, this imagery led me to look up the terrible Waterworld on Wikipedia. Course an hour later, I was reading about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Tuvan throat singing, further proving Randall Munroe correct.)
But I think the most heartbreaking thing about Flood was what happened to the birds and the terrestrial animals. As the humans fight to save themselves, there’s no one to look out for the animals. One of the second generation characters keeps a scrapbook of news about the flood and notes that there’s a web site named Toodle Pip that posts video of animals going extinct. She then describes what happens to the last polar bear. (I think that’s when I had to take my break.)
While I know that the extent of global flooding would never get as bad as Baxter describes in Flood, but if the polar ice caps go, it will get pretty bad. There will be extinctions and refugees, but at least there will always be somewhere to live.