Stephen Baxter - "Ark"

I read this for Science Fiction book club. It is the sequel to Flood, the book in which the world is drowned (over the course of several decades) by water erupting out from subterranaean reservoirs. Or it is kind of a sequel – Ark begins before the other book ends, though it goes on for decades afterwards. Each book could be read independently of the other, more or less.

In Flood the narrative followed quite a few characters and jumped around the world. With this one, though, things are a bit more focussed. The main thrust is on these youngsters being trained up to take part in a spaceflight that should hopefully allow enough humans to escape the drowning world to ensure the survival of our species. These people – the candidates – live largely in a bubble of privilege and comfort as the rising sea levels cause the wider world to go to shit. We get occasional glimpses of that wider world through the eyes of people guarding the space programme's facilities from people trying to flee the rising waters. Like with the first book, Baxter seems very adept at painting a grim picture of a world falling apart. Maybe because of the more precise geographical focus (pretty much all of the earthbound stuff takes place in Colorado), the effect is maybe even more disturbing than in Flood - the book communicates a vivid sense of the horror of the endless retreat from the rising waters and the loss of human decency that this brings with it.

The second half of the book follows the spaceship (called, amazingly, Ark) after its launch into space. Because near future humans have handily managed to develop a warp drive, it is able to travel to the stars in less than centuries, but it still ends up taking decades to get anywhere interesting. And of course a relatively small group of people on a cramped spacecraft is a perfect recipe for an unpleasant hothouse of human emotions, with things getting almost a bit Batavia's Graveyard at one point.

I think maybe the earthbound stuff was the best part of the book, but the space travel stuff still cracks along. The dysfunctional internal politics of the space crew is rather fascinating, but it might have been more interesting if the characters were better drawn. Like a lot of SF writers, Baxter seems more comfortable with the sciencey stuff than in convincing characterisation, and it does seem like the deterioration of one character in particular into a monster is a bit two-dimensional.

Purely as a matter of taste, I found the use of a predatory paedophile as a plot device in the first half of the book a bit distasteful – more for somewhat over-graphic description of a nonce-crime episode. It could just be me, but maybe this is one situation where tell is better than show.

As with Flood, I am a bit ambivalent as to whether Ark is *that* good, but there is no denying the effect Baxter's description of the drowning world has been – I have been having intermittent nightmares about floods since I started reading these works. I suppose that counts as a result.

And in case you are wondering what our next SF book club is, then wonder no more – it is Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I look forward to seeing whether Heinlein is as bad as his reputation suggests. Join us in the ILAC Library on the second Tuesday of October to discuss it.

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"Flood" by Stephen Baxter

This was our most recent SF book club book. There is not really much to it conceptually. Its single idea is to imagine what would happen to the world if the level of the seas started to rise at an ever increasing and implacable rate. The book follows a number of characters as they scramble for higher ground and try to make sense of what is going on. One of the characters is an incredibly rich can-do entrepreneur type who serves as patron to the others, so they get to see more of things than they would if they were just moving between a succession of refugee camps.

Although you might think this is a global warming book, it is established fairly early on that the sea level rise is happening independently of any melting of the polar ice caps. It is also happening faster than even the most alarmist projections of global warming science. The somewhat outlandish explanation that is eventually outlined is that the floor of the ocean has shattered at a number of points, causing some huge sub-oceanic reservoirs of water to spurt forth. There is apparently some scientific evidence to support the existence of these vast bodies of water stored somewhere in or below the earth's crust. It struck me as a bit outlandish, however, that they would all burst out simultanaeously for no obvious reason, or that the rate of flow from them would keep increasing. But the book is more about the depiction of a drowning world than the science.

That depiction of the drowning world is very vivid. Baxter has a great eye for visual detail and telling vignettes, and much of this book will live on in my mind forever – the mobile city of the Seminole, the roofs of the National Gallery covered in pigeons as Trafalgar Square floods (the whole sequence in which the Thames Barrier is overwhelmed and London floods is a tour de force), the cannibalistic gulag into which the Tibetan plateau is transformed, and many more. The character stuff is maybe not so great, with some odd leaps in behavioural logic needing to be swallowed by the reader. But that is just flim-flam compared to the big picture story of the world we know disappearing beneath the waves. The depiction of that horror is done very well, and I must salute Stephen Baxter as a writer of great talent.

However, I cannot really recommend this book. There is something soul-destroying about a work that begins with London flooding and ends with people on rafts watching the sea rise over Mount Everest. Nothing the human characters do can stop or even slow the rising sea levels. Maybe the efforts of the aforementioned entrepreneur and some others will lead to the human race surviving, but it does seem like a pretty marginal existence for the various boat peoples.

There is nevertheless a sequel to Flood, a book with the evocative title of Ark. And it is the next book for SF book club! If you fancy reading it, you can probably pick up a copy from the Dublin Central Library in the ILAC (you may need to ask at the counter for it). It looks like it exists at least somewhat independently to Flood, so you would not have to have read that first. We will be discussing it there on the 14th September.

I should mention that Flood is not the first inundation-themed novel to pass through SF book club. Some time back we read The Drowned World, by J.G. Ballard. That is a very different kind of work. Ballard's characters have a languid detachment that is very different from the desperate energy of Baxter's people. In some ways it seems like Baxter's book is the more realistic while Ballard's has a certain visionary quality to it. Then again, maybe if the world was falling apart around you, your response might just be to kick back with a large gin and tonic.

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"Under the Dome" by Stephen King

I read this for SF book club. It is the first book by King I have read. He is an author I always had down as being primarily for teenagers and have long had the idea that there is something a bit deficient about anyone over the age of 20 who is still reading him. Was I wrong? Read on and see.

The first thing to bear in mind about this book is that it is a total porker – 877 pages worth of Stephen King action. Long books by established authors are always a bit off-putting. The fear must always be that the author has become too powerful to edit, with no one able to stop the fruits of their creativity bloating up in a most unwholesome manner. With Under the Dome I was very much afraid that this would be not so much a book as a sprawling monstrosity bearing only the most passing resemblance to a work of literature. The first question with the book really has to be whether its length is a strength or a weakness.

But first let me outline the novel's premise. What happens is that for no obvious reason the small town of Chester's Mill in Maine finds itself sealed off from the outside world by an invisible dome. It rapidly gets a bit Batavia's Graveyard, particularly once Big Jim Rennie (the local Boss Hogg character) sets up a reign of terror after drafting various thuggish friends of his psychopath son onto the local police force. An Iraq war special forces veteran, conveniently in town when the dome descends, finds himself in a race against time to discover the source of the dome and prevent Big Jim from doing all kinds of bad stuff. The book cuts between loads of characters as events unfold from their point of view.

So, back to the length. It does not start so well. As one of my book club pals points out, the first hundred or so pages just seem to be people crashing into the dome. It is hard not to think that King could have got over that in just a couple of pages. After that, though, it picks up the pace. You sometimes hear books described as page-turners. This is one of those – once it got going, the narrative momentum carried me along and I stormed through the book. The length does seem to work, as it allows the story of the town to be unrolled in great detail and from many points of view. I felt ultimately that the book was long because it ought to be, not because no one can edit Stephen King.

I found myself admiring the authors' technique with this, wondering what writing qualities make a book engaging and hard to put down. For all that, this is not really that good a book. A lot of the characters are a bit thin (though not all of them, by any means), the central premise is never really explained that convincingly, and it does feel a bit like he just has nearly everyone die in a huge explosion because he cannot think of any other way to end things. As it rolls along you maybe do not notice these shortcomings, but they are very obvious once you start reflecting on things.

I would not recommend this book, for all that I enjoyed it far more than I expected to. It has however made me interested in maybe reading something else by King. His ability to draw the reader into a compelling story is impressive and would go well with a book where he had thought through things a bit better. There were also a couple of places in the book where he seemed to really up his game, making me feel like I really was in the presence of something other than a skilled hack-writer*. If this were a first novel I would say, "It's not that great, but aspects of it show real promise". I suppose that might mean that his earlier books are better. What say you?

One final pedantic criticism - this book is barely SF! What is it doing in SF book club?

And the next SF book club is on in the Central Library in the ILAC this coming Tuesday at 6.30 pm. The book is Flood by Stephen Baxter. I have not started reading it yet, so you could get a head start on me.


*if you have read the book yourself, I am thinking firstly of the bit where two of the women cops go snooping around the radio station – there is an almost tangible air of non-specific menace throughout that whole section. Secondly there is the "Feeling It" section about women's netball.

"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card

This is a post about about a book I read for SF book club. If you are interested in SF book club, come along to the ILAC library at 6.30 pm on the second Tuesday of the month.

Warning: Here be spoilers.

The book's set up is in some respects similar to that of Starship Troopers, with humanity locked into an interminable war with the Buggers - insectoid alien sodomites*. The main character is a small child called Ender Wiggins** who is sent off to the star fleet school for promising youngsters. The high command reckon that, on the basis of his genes and his test scores, he could potentially be turned into the genius commander they need to win the space war. The story then follows Ender as he goes through his training. Much of this focuses on the playing of games, with Card impressively having him play electronic games far beyond on anything on offer when the book was written (in the early 1980s, based on a short story from the previous decade).

As the book goes on, the space war games Ender plays become more and more complex. From playing against the computer, he is now up against the great commander of the previous Bugger wars. He has several of his pals from the school to help him, but the games keep getting harder and harder, with more and more Bugger ships to fight in each battle. The final game seems to be his final test, with various star fleet big wigs coming in to see how he does in a simulated battle where his ships are outnumbered a thousand to one. When he still manages to triumph, he is struck by how the watchers' reactions seem a bit over the top, but then he realises the truth – he was not playing games, he was commanding the actual star fleet. The war is now over because he has exterminated the Buggers. He is thirteen years old and has committed genocide.

That is the book's big twist. I gather that Ender's Game started as a short story, so originally there probably was not more to it than the twist. If that was all there was to the novel then it would be a bit slight, but fortunately there is a good bit more. One whole strand involves Ender's (slightly) older sister and brother. Like him, they are hyper-intelligent, but unlike him they were not deemed suitable for battle school. Back on Earth, they manage to use an analogue of the Internet*** to manipulate world politics.

What really raises the book up to another level is the sequence from after the Buggers' annihilation, where Ender joins a colony on one of the aliens' former planets. The Buggers were somehow able to sense Ender as the agent of their destruction, and they manage to leave behind a psychic message for him. In a few pages Card throws us this incredible impressionistic picture of a profoundly alien psychology and form of social organisation. Ender learns that the war with the Buggers was a tragic mistake – the Buggers invaded our solar system without realising that humans were sentient, while humanity's genocidal assault on the insectoids took place when the aliens had realised their mistake and decided to leave us alone. Ender finds himself with a preserved but fertile egg of a Bugger queen – it is in his gift to bring the creatures he exterminated back into being.

And that is how the book ends. Has anyone ever read anything else by Card? I notice that he seems to have a lot of books out there with "Ender" in the title, suggesting that he has spent the rest of his career recycling and further exploring the ideas in his most successful book. I am tempted, but I fear that diminishing returns would rapidly set in.

The one thing I never really bought with this book is how young the characters are meant to be. Ender is something like six when the book starts, twelve or thirteen when it ends. But for all that he is meant to be hyper-intelligent yadda yadda yadda, he never really seems like someone that young. The same is true of the other children at Battle School, who all come across as being at least late teens (in fairness, maybe they are? Ender is meant to be younger than they are).

One other thing I had heard about Card is that he is right-wing, or conservative, or whatever reactionary Americans call themselves these days. I was wondering whether this kind of mindset would infect his writing, but I did not see too much sign of it here. The book is ambivalent about the military, rather than revelling in a Heinlein-style Starship Troopers fascism. The book seems to be broadly against genocide and in favour of non-violent solutions to conflict situations, for all that it does not preach at us about the military people who turn Ender into a weapon of mass destruction. Maybe the one thing that puts the book on the not-liberal side of the map is how it treats religion: when the religious backgrounds of characters are mentioned, it is not to scoff at them or to have the usual SF thing of a religion just being a front for some kind of cynical and manipulative clergy.

*they are not actually sodomites.

**a name that could only have been conjured into being by someone called Orson Scott Card.

***Card was writing when the Internet barely existed and the World Wide Web had not yet been conjured into being.


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Classic Book Club!

Oh yeah, non-Facebook readers may be unaware that the meeting to discuss Moby Dick is now down for Monday 22nd March. The venue is still undecided (possibly the Central Hotel, though I fear it might be too full and on that basis am thinking more of the Lord Edward), but the time is 7.00pm.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in the SF book club, contact me privately for further information.

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