Stone Spring: The Northland Trilogy

by Stephen Baxter

Overview

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 impossible....

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101545461
Publisher:	Temple Publications International, Inc.
Publication date:	11/01/2011
Series:	The Northland Trilogy , #1
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	71,003
File size:	831 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, England, in 1957. He holds degrees in mathematics, from Cambridge University; engineering, from Southampton University; and business administration, from Henley Management College. He’s a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society.

His first professionally published short story appeared in 1987. He has been a full-time author since 1995 and is currently Vice-President of the British Science Fiction Association.

His science fiction novels have been published in the UK, the US, and in many other countries including Germany, Japan, France. His books have won several awards including the Philip K Dick Award, the John Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and the Seiun Award (Japan) and have been nominated for several others, including the Arthur C Clarke Award, the Hugo Award and Locus awards. He has also published over 100 sf short stories, several of which have won prizes. He can be found at stephen-baxter.com.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Praise for Stephen Baxter and Stone Spring

“There are few speculators in fiction with a greater reputation for boldness and breadth than Stephen Baxter.”—Strange Horizons

“A learned, imaginative, bold, sweeping, wonderful evocation of life and the world 10,000 years ago.”—The Daily Mail (UK)

“Baxter proves to be not only a gifted storyteller but also a master of speculative fiction.…An epic tale not unlike Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.”—Library Journal

Editorial Reviews

Baxter launches the Northland trilogy with this solid alternate history that stands nicely alone. In Northland, the stretch of land that is now the North Sea, adolescent Ana celebrates her “blood tide” in the matriarchal village of Etxelur while worrying about her missing father and her older sister, Zesi, who seems less interested in her savage Pretani betrothed than in his younger brother. After a tsunami kills most of the villagers, Ana is inspired by Novu, an ex-slave from Jericho, to attempt to build a wall that will hold back the sea and prevent her land from sinking. Typical Baxter touches include a large but not unwieldy cast of characters and a sudden shift forward in time, but the well-researched setting (complete with endnotes) and occasionally over-the-top interpersonal and intertribal drama keep things fresh. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

During the Mesolithic era (10,000 B.C.E. to 4000 B.C.E.), a vast plain connected the British Isles to the European continent until melting ice flooded this land mass. Baxter's (Flood; Ark) latest novel reimagines what life might have been like for the hunter-gatherers confronted with a changing landscape. Ana, a girl from the Northland settlement of Etxelur, meets a wanderer named Novu from the distant walled city of Jericho. The visionary Ana recognizes that a wall to keep out the rising seas could save her village and allow it to prosper. Thus begins a massive building project that requires a lifelong commitment from the villagers, most of whom will not live to see its completion. VERDICT Baxter proves to be not only a gifted storyteller but also a master of speculative fiction, bringing together ancient civilization with present ecological uncertainties to tell an epic tale not unlike Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. His series debut should appeal to fans of Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear.

Library Journal

You want climate change? Try living back in the Paleolithic, when proto-Picts prowled, icebergs melted and odd travelers from Jericho ate your store of elk meat and gawked at your daughter uninvited. That's the setup for sci-fi/fantasy writer Baxter's (Evolution, 2003, etc.) latest, the first volume of a projected trilogy. (The author, it seems, will not write a self-contained book when a series is possible.) The setting is a northerly peninsula of a place called Northland, a fertile and very nice locale, "a rich, rolling landscape that extended to the south as far as you could walk." Said peninsula, Etxelur, along with the rest of Northland, now lies under the waves, pondered by stalwarts puffing their hookahs in Amsterdam cafes, but 10,000 years ago it was the province of Baxter's heroine, a teenage girl named Ana (shades of Ayla, of Clan of the Cave Bear fame) who enjoys bouncing about in animal hides and striking up conversations about fashion with strangers out of neighboring Albia ("We make it from reeds and bark and stuff," says said stranger of his ensemble, shivering in what would appear to be the last of the cold weather before the Big Melt). There are things to like about a book with characters named Shaper, Ice Dreamer, Mammoth Talker and Moon Reacher, but it takes Baxter a long while to--beg pardon--warm up to his overarching subject, which is that the lowland that is Northland is ever so noticeably disappearing as the seas come lapping up ever higher, thanks to melting ice caps and other accouterments of what we're calling climate change these days. Enter that stranger, kidnapped all the way from the walled city of Jericho, who sets in motion one of the brighter ideas of the Old Stone Age: namely, building a great wall to keep the seas out. Will our ancestral Hans Brinker save Ana and pals from the fate of Atlantis? That particular bit of denouement, you might guess, awaits another installment. Jean Auel meets Al Gore--but without Auel's sense of drama and around-the-fire storytelling, and without Gore's skill at popularizing science.

Kirkus Reviews