mere 16 hours: that's the brief interval that separates the events of Maelstrom, Peter Watts' second novel, from the tumultuous climax of Starfish , his 1999 debut. But what a difference a few hours can make.
At the close of the first book, the global authorities of the mid-21st century had just exploded a large atomic bomb on an undersea rift vent some hundreds of kilometers off the Pacific coast of North America. Their goal: to sterilize the source of an awful threat. This vent was the only home of a non-DNA-using type of microbe, an ancient species safely isolated for millennia, which unfortunately could still colonize and slowly kill humans and most other land-based lifeforms. An undersea geothermal powerplant and its workers situated on the rift had brought the two types of life into contact, however. Now mankind faced slow but certain extinction, should the bugs get loose in an environment where they faced no natural enemies or even engineered cures. That the bomb would unleash devasting earthquakes and tsunamis around the Pacific Rim, killing millions on the surface and of course all those at the powerplant, was deemed an acceptable price to pay for humanity's survival.
But the authorities, whose prime embodiment is a heartless professional "corpse" known as Patricia Rowan, failed to reckon with two survivors, both ex-rifters, humans modified for deep-sea work and living. Lenie Clarke was the longest-serving rifter at the plant, and although she was feeling suicidal and actually chose to perish, she was saved by an accidental chain of events. The other wild card is Ken Lubin, a trained assassin who had been working undercover at the plant. Now both are back on dry land, each contaminated with ßehemoth, the archaic organism, and each a threat to the plans of the merciless ruling class.
Additionally, we meet some new characters. Achilles Desjardins and Alice Jovellanos, workers for the Complex Systems Instability-Response Agency, or as it's familiarly known, the Entropy Patrol; Sou-Hon Perreault, a tele-operator of the many roving spycams employed by the government; and Anemone, a burgeoning AI living in the Maelstrom of the title, which is the souped-up virtual ecology once known as the Internet. As Lenie Clarke arrows deliberately through the shattered country like a Typhoid Mary and Ken Lubin seeks information and revenge, these newcomers will find themselves playing a mortally vital part in the fate of the globe.
State-of-the-art hard SF
Like the endlessly mutating and recombinant digital/wetware entities that live in Peter Watts' online Maelstrom, his fiction itself exhibits a wonderful Darwinian adaptability. Internalizing the lessons and modes taught by cyberpunk and fusing them with the Bear/Benford pedigree of hard SF, Watts has bred a robust, streamlined, snarling kind of science fiction which achieves both a sharp-edged verisimilitude and visionary exuberance. From such innovative, catchy neologisms as "head cheese" (the term for gel-based AIs) to the scrupulous research on a dozen fronts which Watts, a marine biologist himself, catalogs in an appendix, these two novels are state-of-the art SF. And best of all, Maelstrom does not merely repeat the successes of Starfish but extends them into new territory, thus giving hope that Watts is no mere one-hit wonder.
The first book fused the undersea extrapolations of Arthur C. Clarke's classic The Deep Range (1957) with the psychological unsettlingness of Michael Moorcock's The Black Corridor (1969). (And of course Lenie's surname is tribute to the former influence.) With its reliance on basically a single stageset—the Beebe station at the Channer Vent—the book achieved total immersion, so to speak, in its strange environment. Much like Maureen McHugh's Half the Day is Night (1994), Watts managed to make fresh an SF conceit—engineered merpeople—that had been pretty much abandoned as played-out.
The new book pulls more of a Paul McAuley maneuver, densely limning a whole future sociocultural landscape under assault. (In fact, McAuley's The Secret of Life, out earlier this year, synchronistically employs the same authorial tone and MacGuffin, with McAuley's superbugs coming from Mars.) Watts does not neglect any aspect of his future, rethinking everything from the Internet to the balance of political power (Canada is top dog, thanks to winning the Hydro Wars). Even the very job held by Achilles Desjardins, riding herd on threatening emergent behaviors, is something hardly fathomable by earlier generations.
It's now officially a cliché to label anyone "the new Heinlein," so I won't do so here. But I will say that this is a novel Heinlein would have endorsed.
