Flooded: Winner of the Klaus Flugge Prize for Illustration 2023

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Flooded is an allegory of community responsibility. Not only is Mariajo Ilustrajo’s storytelling deft and attention grabbing, but the way she sequences the story, with huge landscape images against comic style intimate commentary, is assured. Altogether, Flooded is an exceptional, confident and necessary picture book that we recommend to readers of all ages. Genre: This wordless book would fall under the Fiction genre because it is not about one specific family. Under the umbrella of Fiction it would be considered a Realistic Fiction book because a flood is an event that can, and does, happen all the time to people in real life. Having kids read this Realistic Fiction book could teach them what it is like for people who experience floods and give them something to relate to if they have experienced one for themselves. This mixture of irrelevance, error and confusion continues throughout the book. It is about rising sea levels, but from hydrothermal plumes rather than global warming; at least I think it is, although it is mainly about some people meeting each other in various disaster areas over a period of years. Remember, the ark wasn't built in a day. And this incredible thing God is building in you won't happen in a day either.” (p. 113)

Some of us are building something in faith. And some of us are building something out of fear … Faith and fear both fight for you to believe in something you cannot see. Choose your battles wisely.” (p. 195) In 1977, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote Lucifer's Hammer, a novel dealing with the collapse of civilization after the Earth is hit by a massive comet. Find the familiar faithfulness of God in His Word when it feels like nothing is normal and everything is falling apart. I knew this was not going to go well when one character said to another that it stood to reason that floodwater would not rise higher than the old (pre-Roman) shoreline. The author had earlier said that sea levels had risen one metre between 2010 and 2016, on top of the measured rise between 1900 and 2010 (around 20cm) and any earlier changes. He was also describing a storm surge at the time which had over-topped the 20.1m high Thames Barrier. Instead of pointing out that the position of the beach two millennia earlier was as relevant and reasonable as the proverbial banana in the circumstances, our character goes sploshing off down the Strand. For example, the beginning section of the book goes to the trouble of differentiating between disbelief, unbelief, and doubt. I still am not clear what the difference is.Zoe, left behind in the confusion, survives there as best she can. Alone and desperate among marauding gangs, she manages to dig a derelict boat out of the mud and escape to Eels Island. But Eels Island, whose raggle-taggle inhabitants are dominated by the strange boy Dooby, is full of dangers too. When it was written, the world’s major anxiety was nuclear weapons: The possibility that the United States and the Soviet Union (with a much smaller role played by China) would annihilate humanity with a massive exchange of explosions and radiation was a pervasive nightmare. Lucifer's Hammer was a clear response to this anxiety. It allowed the authors the chance to explore many of the likely consequences of nuclear war without triggering the enmity of either the “peace-nik” or “warmonger” crowds. Curiously, it wasn’t until several years later that the “nuclear winter” hypothesis made a cometary impact an even more appropriate stand-in for a massive nuclear exchange. The book’s strength is, oddly for a “hard” science fiction effort, in the characters. Each is a well crafted and unique personality. Most are personable enough that we care about their fates, sometimes grudgingly, others are distasteful enough that we also care about their fates, although perhaps with animosity. But our affection or disdain won’t last nearly as long as the book — the end simply takes too long to reach. The first half or so moves adequately fast, when the extent of the disaster is still being revealed, but once we are clued in to the world’s ultimate fate... the details of how individuals react are undoubtedly necessary, but not riveting enough to keep things interesting. We do our part, but God does the hardest. He never expects us to carry the weight of what it means to believe Him / above all our doubts. Trust often feels like the hard thing … in the midst of the hard thing. But I have to also remind myself that God has a habit of doing holy things in the midst of the hard things.” (p. 118-119) It starts with our introduction to the group of hostages are the characters who take us through the story, their lives intertwining as the world disappears under the waves.

Lily, Helen, Gary and Piers, hostages released from five years captivity at the hands of Christian Extremists in Spain, return to England and the first rumours of a flood of positively Biblical proportions… The idea behind this post apocalyptic world was fascinating and it wasn't too preachy seeing as it is a possible eventuality of global warming. A small group of hostages are rescued after years of captivity and find themselves in an unrecognizable world where the oceans are slowly taking over. God commands. Noah listens. And repeat. Is it possible we're experiencing unbelief in our lives because we haven't been willing to take a posture of humility?” (p. 50)I imagine this book happened this way. A group of intelligent science fiction writers were sitting around a table and drinking perhaps a bit too much and they were making a list of the worst science fiction movies of all time. Stephen Baxter who was a little drunk at the time shouts out "Waterworld!" and everyone laughs especially at the fish gilled Kevin Costner character. And seriously where did all that water come from! And then Stephen got a glassy look on his face and said you know what? I can make that work! I can make Waterworld plausible. His friends all laughed in his face, so Stephen got determined and unlike most ideas we get when we are drinking he said not only will I make Waterworld plausible I'll create a TRILOGY! So there you have it whether you asked for it or not you now have a plausible version of Waterworld.

This is an adventure story, where characters rush around, surrounded by natural – and man-made disasters, but characters in such fast-paced novels do not have to be stereotypical or wooden. Unfortunately, in this novel they are both. We begin with a group of hostages, released by a megalomaniac billionaire, who then keeps a vaguely proprietary eye on them for the next however many years this book goes on for. For the characters emerge into a world which is flooding and, as the water rises higher and higher, people are pushed onto higher ground, or onto the water on various rafts and other crafts - including, bizarrely, a replica of the Queen Mary (remember the bizarre billionaire?)

Christmas in the Forest

Stephen Baxter is a prolific author, and it shows in a number of his works - they are very Clarkian, taking an interesting idea (in this case a vast planet drowning flood) and following it to it's conclusion. As with all Stephen Baxter novels, there are some fascinating ideas here. There's a lot of solid, hard science and the story about water levels rising on the planet and the consequences of that are told without too much political hay made about climate change or global warming. She was honest with her struggles to make those decisions while showing us the things she's doing and that we can do to go forward. There is a story being written in the midst of your unknown, loss, and grief. Your hard days actually mean something … But you get to decide who you will be.” (p. 193) As the water continues to rise and humans try to find a way to explain or beat the flood, chaos takes over every corner of the world. And countries start to disappear. I was horrified when I read about what happens to Sydney. :(