Book Review: Ark by Stephen Baxter

I read this a few months ago but I'll try to remember. This is the sequel to Flood, where the hidden waters under the crusts of the earth open up and consume the planet leaving not even the tip of Mount Everest exposed. I know (according to Baxter's research) that these hypothetical pockets of water may exist but I simply can't believe they would amount to that much water, nor that while flooding some other geological cataclysms wouldn't occur, as in shifting plate tectonics raising some land formations. But I am not a geologist so we'll assume this could actually happen for sake of the review.

As one may conclude, Ark would have something to do with humans surviving on some sort of ship. This is indeed the case. Most of the book revolves around a group of children being groomed for space flight on a ship that will send a small remnant of humanity to another world to start anew. The education of the children and some of the politics are interesting, as is the workings of the ship. However, being as this is about saving the human race I was (in my probably misguided desire for happy endings) hoping it would be a more uplifting story, humanity over coming adversity, et al. But if you follow the news much, you could say that what happens aboard the ship is what one should typically expect from a bunch of inexperienced children trying to cope with deviant human nature and other nasty human qualities when they had NO life experience to deal with it.

The oldest of these kid are in their mid 20s so none of them have the guts or knowledge to really deal with some major screw ups the big one being a sexual deviant megalomaniac getting himself in power. Now I'd say if they had some older crewmen, say in their 30s or 40s, this would never have happened. But they wanted to save space for breeders so only youngsters were sent.

There are a few chapters devoted to the water raft cultures developing on earth as well as another ark which I won't mention so as not to spoil everything, but most of the story is devoted to the space ship arc. I'd say it was worthwhile reading it just to know how not to populate a space ship but it certainly left me with a "well crap" kind of feeling and wanting to throw the book against the wall.

I have no idea if there will be a third book, I really can't see what would be interesting in the lives of any of the survivors.