Date Finished: 19/09/11
Score: B
Genre: Historical/Alternative History
Opening Line: “…The day of Ana’s blood tide, with her father missing, and her mother dead, was always going to be difficult…”
I only picked this book because of the magnificent big wave splashing up on the front cover. I like waves, so surely any book with such a wonderful wave on its front must be good? Well as it so happens – it was. STONE SPRING is the first volume of the Northland trilogy and is set in ancient times against a background of global warming and its effect on the humans living at that time. The time is around 7,000 years BC and is set in Doggerland, a large and fertile stretch of land that joined the British Isles to the rest of Europe and is now under the North Sea. Ana lives in a small fishing community, one of many different tribes who share the land, and life as they all know it is starting to change. The planet is warming, the ice caps are melting, the seas are starting to rise and the continents shift causing massive earthquakes. One fateful day a roar of thunder is heard in the distance and a massive tsunami sweeps in and destroys lives, homes, and hunting grounds. Their ways of life are changed for ever, not just for Ana’s people, traders relay the information that all over the known world the seas are rising and refugees are on the move.
Present day geography will tell you that nature won, Doggerland is no more, it is buried fathoms below the surface of the North Sea. However author, Stephen Baxter, takes a ‘what if’ approach – what if the sea had been kept back, prevented from reclaiming the land, how would the world be now? STONE SPRING starts his alternative version of history, a version where one young girl decides to take a stand and spends her whole life building a wall that stretches for miles, a wall that keeps the sea out, and changes the geography of the world. Baxter has created a believable and credible alternative history to that which we know today. He takes the known historical truths, the known scientific facts and bases his story on those, then twists just enough to go in a completely different direction and produce his alternative ‘what if’ history. Starting with just one small community, the reclamation of the land spread out across Doggerland as other tribes take up the battle. Where will the fight against the oceans end? Who will win – humans or nature? No-one knows yet as there are two more tomes to follow this huge, almost 500 pages, production that is so quick and easy to read (even the gruesome bits) that the reader is not aware of the size of the book.
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