/lit/ - Literature

>>19335225
Ark, Flood #2 - Stephen Baxter (2009)
As with the first book, this is another one where expectations probably need to be tempered, perhaps even more so. The first half is preparation and second half is the journey. That doesn't seem to leave any time for the destination you may think, and you'd be right. The narrative follows a group of preteens well into their old age. Works that follow characters over the course of their entire lives has been an interest of mine and in that regard this doesn't disappoint. There's very little overlap in terms of characters from the first book. Two of my previous readings biased me against this novel. Le Guin had done a very similar story, seven years earlier. The latter half of this one forced me to unfavorably compare it to Paradises Lost, which was better in every way. I don't know if it was an inspiration for this or if Baxter came up with it entirely independently. They seemed remarkedly similar to me. The other is Stephenson's Seveneves which was published six years later. I liked that less than this and being reminded of it was a negative. Sometimes it can be difficult to judge a book by itself, assuming that's even preferable, and that was certainly the case for me with this one. Some of these shortcomings are supposedly addressed by the three relatively short novellas Baxter wrote afterwards, which are collected in Landfall. I'll be reading those very soon as well. I enjoyed Flood more, but that may only be because I had less to immediately compare it to. Without my biases others may fare better reading this.
Rating: 3/5