Preface: Have only read one Stephen Baxter book before, Sunstorm, which he co-authored with Arthur C. Clarke. Masterful writing by Baxter. Stone Spring not only portrays the changing physical geography of climate change but the changing human geography as well. Baxter creates a simulated world whose characters take on a life of their own, becoming throughout the book a product of their experiences. This is one of the few books that would benefit any high school curriculum. While the storyline did reach 18+ maturity at times, it added to the human element Baxter simulated so well. Every time I write my thoughts about a Stephen Baxter book, I feel like I have to explain the history that he and I share together. The bottom line is that I will probably read anything he's written. It's just how it goes for me. His early novels were epic science fiction in the order of Olaf Stapledon. Huge, universal scale problems, of which humanity played such a small role that we were more akin to botflies swarming around corpses on a battlefield. Yes, we might be arguing over our own issues as we descended onto the corpse, but the larger war that was being waged was something us mere humans weren't even dimly aware of. So the wars we raged across the cosmos were unnoticed by the real powers that be, unless we managed to annoy someone enough to warrant getting squished. That was the background of the Xelee sequence of novels that I discovered in the early nineties. That captured my imagination in a way nothing else I'd ever read had. But then he started moving away from that sort of storytelling. He wrote more about near future missions, Titan, Moonseed... cold war era space race alt histories (Voyage), and then into more esoteric subjects, like Evolution itself, or his Weaver books. My enjoyment waned a bit, but I kept reading. He still tends to think about subjects I like thinking about, and it shows in his books. This one, Stone Spring, is set at the end of the last ice age (about 10,000 years ago), as the world's oceans are rising, coastal communities across the globe are being forced to abandon their homes as the ocean takes back its lands. I can see with Flood, Ark, and this novel, that he's been thinking about earth's geology of late.And in this book, one small community fights back against the rising seas, constructing a seawall that will let them live on their ancestral lands as the world around them floods. This is one part Clan of the Cave Bear, and one part Pillars of the Earth. Great to read, fun to think about, and as always, researched to the nth degree.I loved it.
What do You think about Stone Spring (2010)?
I'm usually quite a satisfied reader of Baxter's novels but this one failed to deliver much for me.
—ColorguardGirl2014
Pretty good. Interesting story of human interaction but not sure where it will lead....
—Paige
OK - I enjoyed the bibliography at the end.
—PhuPhu1120
