This is the inevitable sequel to the Long Earth, which I reviewed last year.
In case you have forgotten, in the first novel a multiverse of parallel earths – the Long Earth – is discovered, along with the ability for humans to travel quickly and simply along a sequential series of earths. Its not quite clear how people “step”, nor why a process in Book 1 which is restricted to the movement of a small amount of material can now in Book 2 be accomplished at speed in great airships.
The novel charts a series of voyages across the Long Earth in search of various goals. And there’s the first of many issues – the different journeys recorded here are not clearly linked. The narrative switches between them at frequent intervals but the process of drawing them together, both thematically and in terms of their eventual outcomes, is pretty tortuous. The novel also struggles to find a theme – is it the relationship between humans and the other sentient species it discovers? (Strangely man has never evolved other than on Datum (the original earth) even though the novel is insistent that each earth is very similar to its neighbour save for small deviations, which over time lead to more significant changes (e.g. sentient dogs).) Or is it a rerun of the colonisation of North America, where the settlers gradually asserted their independence from the tax levying home country? Other weighty themes, on mortality and the uniqueness of the self are introduced but not pursued with any determination. The Long War promised in the title, a war across the parallel universes between man and trolls or settlers and state fizzles out with a shot being fired, thereby acting as a neat metaphor for the novel itself.
When you think of a typical terry Pratchett novel what do you envisage? A well developed, in fact a probably very cleverly thought out, plot, inventiveness in language, ideas, characters and plot development, well written fun to read prose, and above all else, wit. Witty turns of phrase, characters, plots. Characters that having been developed over several novels have come to have a life of their own, be it Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, or Lord Veterinari, all the way through to the minor characters such as Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler. None of which can be found here. No humour, no wit, no inventiveness, just more and more “stepping” and minor variations on the world before.
Clearly there is very little Pratchett here, or at least I hope so, and his name has been leased to build sales. Cynical but understandable. What worries me most is how many more volumes of this endlessly recyclable stuff is stored away for future publications, eventually becoming “based on an idea by”. The Tolkien estate is still generating apparently new content under the JRR brand decades after his death, so I can only assume the same will happen here. Which is a pity, a real pity.
Category Archives: Stephen Baxter
Ark by Stephen Baxter
“Ark” is the sequel to Baxter’s “Flood”, reviewed here a few days ago. This is a real doorstep of a book, as science fiction often is, which picks up the story several years before “Flood” ends. The central theme – a space rocket takes survivors to another world to avoid the apocalyptic flooding of earth – had already been heavily trailled in “Flood”, and Baxter covers some familiar ground in opening, presumably for the benefit of readers who hadn’t read the previous novel. (Incidentally, JK Rowling was a master of this – she always got the “what you missed” section out of the way early in the Potter novels, with considerable economy – although towards the end of the series she stopped bothering, on the grounds if you didn’t know Harry was a wizard etc then you had been living in a hole in the ground for the last five years. Anyway, back to “Ark”).
“Ark” has a very similar construction to “Flood” – short chapters following a large group of characters, with a few individuals at the core; occasional significant time jumps; a tendency to somewhat casually kill people off and usher in new generations quite regularly. In fact this is probably best seen as a mirror novel of “Flood” with the only significant different being the terrain – space instead of earth and water.
Baxter indulges himself with a leisurely account of the early days of the flooded earth space programme, constantly threatened by the rising water and the human tide which accompanies it. The group of Candidates being trained to undertake the flight are examined closely, although I felt that the time jumps and the sudden deaths made it harder to care about any of them. Zane, the most vulnerable, was unconvincing – someone with his vulnerabilities and weaknesses would be unlikely to have passed the various vetting processes.
I think we all know without spending too much time considering the issue that long months and years in deep space would be terribly boring, and it is a challenge to the author to make them seem less so. He can fast forward decades in a page but we still return to the same setting with the same crew (give or take) and the same set of issues.
After ten years the crew reach Earth 2, which despite its flora and fauna and evidence of advanced intelligence is considered by most to be uninhabitable – leading to a three way split between them – some try to settle Earth 2, others decide to return to Earth, hoping that the waters had receded (they hadn’t!) and a third group vote to push on another unimaginable 30 years to a possible Earth 3. I would have liked to hear more about what happened on Earth 2, but this group is not mentioned again. The group that returns to Earth find Ark 2, an unlikely underwater settlement, but the main focus is on the group that travels on to Earth 3, giving us a lot more of the same. Planet fall, when it comes, is almost as much a relief for the reader as it must have been for the passengers.
I have no evidence for this, as usual, but my hunch is that what really interests Baxter is the speculative science behind inter-stellar travel, colonisation of new planets, etc, and the plot and characters in this novel as simply window-dressing around this core. Which isn’t really good enough is it?
Flood by Stephen Baxter
Working on the basis that anyone Terry Pratchett decides to work with must be pretty damn good, I decided to give Stephen Baxter another try after “The Long Earth” (see review last month). “Flood” appeared to stand out from the other recommendations for reasons I haven’t decided upon. The name really tells you most of what you need to know about the premise of the book – the world floods in genuinely biblical proportions. The novel opens in the very near future with the release of a small group of hostages from their captives in Spain, a release facilitated by the Gates/Jobs/Branson like boss of one of the hostages. 
From this point the waters begin to rise, and never stop, and we follow the lives of the hostages as they try to adapt, along with the rest of the world.
You can probably pencil in most of the main events along the way – the gradual breakdown of society, the development of enclaves of the rich, the move to a floating society – didn’t Kevin Costner cover this in Waterworld? There is little to keep you reading beyond the inevitable and unending succession of watery disasters. I didn’t identify with any of the principal characters, and I got the impression Baxter didn’t either, so lightly did he ink them in and so casually did he kill them off. The episodic nature of the description of the flood is reinforced by regular time jumps – several years pass between chapters, and if this is an attempt to avoid any boredom with the inevitability of the progression of the flood then it doesn’t work.
As a highly regarded science fiction writer the very least I would have expected from Baxter is some coherent science, but that is probably the most disappointing part of the novel – the attempts to explain the causes of the flood are pretty risible. There are some successful things about this novel – the description of a generation growing up never having known land for example worked well for me – this is a small consolation to what is otherwise another hugely disappointing work. I am going to persist however and have ordered the sequel “Ark” as something stubborn within me wants to know where Baxter is going with this.
The Reading Bug 