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

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. ( )

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.

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. ( )

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. ( )