February 06, 2005
Starfish by Peter Watts
She floods the airlock.
By now the feeling is almost sensual; her insides folding flat, the ocean rushing into her, cold and unstoppable as a lover. At 4 deg C the Pacific slides into the plumbing in her chest, anesthetizing the parts of her that can still feel. The water rises over her head; her eyecaps show her the submerged walls of the lock with crystal precision.
At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is a daisy chain of volcanoes, faults and crustal fractures. One of these segments is the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Near an undersea volcano at the southern tip of this ridge is Beebe Station, a manned maintenance station for a power station that taps the energy produced by hydrothermal vents. This is the setting for this hard-sf novel.
As can be seen in the above quote, humans have to be bio-engineered to live in this hostile environments. They have only one lung used only when breathing air in the station. Outside the station, while swimming on the ocean floor, their lungs deflate and the machines loaded into the rest of their chest cavity take over and convert water into oxygen. Speech is artificially synthesized directly from the larynx, and they wear skin and eyes that are adjusted to life under the crushing depth of the ocean.
In early hard-sf stories about space-faring by humans, there was a lot of discussion about the ideal crew to travel for long periods of time in a small enclosed environment that fosters on its inhabitants feelings of paranoia, guilt, fear, rage and other anti-social feelings. Peter Watts has a new take on this problem, in which the corporation which owns this claustrophobic power station on the ocean floor uses individuals that already display all of these traits, and for whom there will be little adjustment required for a long-term stay in this environment. The crew consists of various perpetrators of domestic violence, child abuse victims and paranoid schizophrenic pedophiles for good measure. It seemed at the beginning, that this tactic would be misused by the author and the characters would remain caricatures, but as the story progresses I was repeatedly surprised at the plotting and characterization. While they are not truly post-human, the characters stay interesting long enough for the hard science part to catch on.
It is difficult to talk about the hard-sf backbone of the story without giving too much away. But rest assured, there is more than just atmosphere and interesting characters in this story (as it should be in a hard-sf novel).
Being a hard-sf purist, I would have preferred the story to be without the marginal use of ESP and the usual Penrose-inspired nonsense about consciousness. Penrose's worst legacy is his corruption of otherwise discriminating science-fiction authors. But this is a minor annoyance, and your mileage will vary.
To top off a successful hard-sf endeavour, Peter Watts has an excellent section at the end of this book which points out all the scientific references for the ideas that were used in this book. As he says, `you might be surprised at how much of this stuff I *didn't* make up.' A couple of the more interesting references are: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) web pages on oceanic vents and an article about an alternative genetic template using pyranosal RNA called `The Origin of Life on Earth' by L. E. Orgel (Scientific American, October 1994). Also visit Peter Watts' web page which has more background details and pictures about this novel.
Update: Peter Watts has written a few sequels to this book. The first sequel called "Maelstrom", I found to be disappointing.
%T Starfish %A Peter Watts %I Tor Books %D 1999 %G ISBN: 0812575857 (pb) %P 374 %K science-fiction
Date written: 2000/08/26
Posted by anoop at February 6, 2005 12:23 AM