In July 2016 the world is literally sinking.
Flood by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
A group of hostages (scientists and military officials) rescued by a private security company from captivity in Barcelona, where they have been held for five years in the wake of the collapse of the Spanish government, return to a world where sea levels have started to rise.
Warnings to governments are ignored; denial has set in. Our heroes — Lily, Garry, Piers and Helen — find themselves closely tied in the years that follow to their rescuer, billionaire Nathan Lammockson and his company AxysCorp, as he tries to create a new order — for better and worse — as countries and continents start to submerge. Through their eyes we watch as civilisation as we know it starts to disappear, with often anarchic results.
During the 1960s the novelist JG Ballard, then still seen as part of the “new wave” (pardon the pun) of British science fiction, wrote a series of novels in which he sometimes gleefully destroyed the world (including a story called aptly The Drowned World).
Brilliantly written, these works were somewhat cold and distant. Contemporary science-fiction writer Baxter deals with a similar scenario but from different premises.
First, where Ballard sought to describe, Baxter seeks to explain the scientific possibility of rising sea waters — a combination of climate change, seismic activity and a hypothesis that oceans may exist beneath the earth’s crust. (This he backs up with references to scientific papers in journals such as Nature, Science and New Scientist).
Second, Baxter focuses on the all too human side of these events, describing how people struggle to survive yet remain human, bonded by loyalties rooted in a common experience, namely, the captivity of our four main characters. The result is that though the book is grim, it is perhaps ultimately hopeful.
During the course of reading this novel, which I started during a storm in Johannesburg, a tsunami hit the Pacific and the city of Manila in the Philippines, a city for which I have great fondness, experienced its worst floods in 50 years.
It made me wonder how far off the mark this excellently crafted science fiction novel might be.