Stone spring

by Stephen Baxter

Paper Book, 2010

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Series

Alternate Histories (1)

Northland (1)

Genres

Science Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

London : Gollancz, 2010.

Description

Fantasy. Fiction. Thriller. Historical Fiction. HTML:Praised as �??one of the most inventive writers that science fiction has ever produced�?� (SF Site), national bestselling author Stephen Baxter presents a new saga of a world that could have become our own.... Ten thousand years ago, a vast and fertile plain existed that linked the British Isles to Europe. Home to a tribe of simple hunter-gatherers, Northland teems with nature�??s bounty, but is also subject to its whims. Fourteen-year-old Ana calls Northland home, but her world is changing. The air is warming, the ice is melting, and the seas are rising. One day Ana meets a traveler from a far-distant city called Jericho�??a town that is protected by a wall. And she starts to imagine the im… (more)

Media reviews

SFX

He’s one of the few SF writers for whom comparisons with Arthur C Clarke are completely warranted, but for all of Stephen Baxter’s imaginative forays into hard SF, he’s just as interested in our distant past. With novels like Evolution and series like Time’s Tapestry, he’s looked at

history from some truly mind-bending angles, and his latest novel kicks off a series that’s close to being a prehistoric companion piece to Flood, his ecological disaster novel of 2008. Set 10,000 years ago in the Mesolithic period, Stone Spring takes place in Doggerland, an expanse of land that used to link Britain to mainland Europe, and which is home to a variety of tribes. Among these are the people of Etxelur, but their usual struggles for survival are swept aside when a tsunami devastates their home, and it becomes plain that Doggerland is gradually sinking under the waves. So far, so historical, and for the first half of Stone Spring it’d be easy to think that Baxter is just playing out the events of Flood in a different, non-SF setting. However, what makes the book more than just an engaging and gritty portrait of the Mesolithic era is what happens next, as one girl in the Etxelur tribe sets out to do the seemingly impossible and build a wall that will stand against the oncoming flood. Suddenly we’re in an alternate history, and Baxter maps out a different course for the Mesolithic while still giving us a gripping and often startlingly violent human drama. He does a fantastic job of evoking the book’s harsh and brutal environment, utilising plenty of convincing world-building while keeping the story moving along at a gripping pace. A couple of moments don’t quite convince, but this is still an impressive and relevant novel that sets up some very intriguing directions for the rest of the Northland saga to go in. Saxon Bullock

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User reviews

LibraryThing member twiglet12

I've been a big fan of Stephen Baxter for years now with books like Evolution, Flood, Ark and the Time's Tapestry series really standing out for me. Stone Spring, being the first book in the Northland saga, sets up a prehistoric world that I just loved getting lost in for a couple of days and has

set up a premise that seems to promises some brilliant alternate history world-building in the next couple of novels. Definitely worth a read.

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LibraryThing member AlanPoulter

I am afraid that I made a mistake buying this book. I have most of this author's work to date so bought this one without any hesitation. I was expecting science fiction, but instead got a rather 'cardboard' attempt at recreating the deep past. Lots of research had obviously been done, but after a

few hundred pages of info-dumped details about plants and animals, and a stereotyped set of characters (the nice guy, his macho father, the independent-minded woman he loves etc,) I had had enough. Apparently there is an 'alternative history' thread driving this (and two later novels) about confronting climate change and remaking our future as a result.There could well be some interesting science fiction written about the really giant leaps made in prehistory (intelligence, speech, tools, fire, farming etc) but this novel seems to want to go for trilogy length by attenuating out a very thin 'master plot' way beyond its natural length. A short story would have sufficed.

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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50

Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter is the first in the Northlands trilogy where the author speculates about the distant past and, in this version, changes the outcome so that the land bridge that connected Great Britain to Europe is not sunk under the sea but instead due to a system of dikes and dams,

holds back the oncoming oceans. The time period is the Mesolithic period, circa 8000 B.C. , and much of the earth’s waters are locked into glaciers, the oceans are lower and land that is buried today is exposed and has people living on it. As the glaciers melted, the oceans rose and covered much of this land.

The story follows a group of people who live in this area, their way of life is threatened by the rising of the oceans and a series of tsunamis which are vividly depicted in the story. Although I found this book at some 500 plus pages a little long, the story was interesting as the people of Etxelur struggle to save their homeland from sinking. There is more to the story than just building dams as the story is centered around one prehistoric girl who envisions a better world for her tribe. There are power struggles, wars between various tribes and revenge among family members which brought a lot of action to the story and, while there were a few parts that required me to stretch my imagination a little to far, for the most part I enjoyed this story and look forward to continuing on with the trilogy.

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LibraryThing member PDCRead

Not too bad. An intersting take on the loss of the land between the Uk and the continent.

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