riginally, Peter Watts intended to produce a trilogy. First came Starfish (1999), in which we were introduced to Lenie Clarke, a "rifter," one of the abused workers whose bodies had been drastically modified to be at home in a deep-sea environment. Next followed Maelstrom (2001), detailing how the corporation-rifter feud ended up with the unleashing of the deadly archaic ßehemoth bug on the world, bringing about the collapse of civilization. But now, in place of a single third book to conclude the series, we get two, due to the tale's commercially forbidding length, which necessitated splitting. (Watts's foreword tells all.) The book under discussion here will be followed in a few months by ßehemoth: Seppuku.
In this installment, an ocean-floor habitat dubbed Atlantis is home to guilty corporate executives ("corpses") and their families and support crew, as well as a large contingent of rifters, including Lenie. An uneasy truce exists between the two factions, each of which blames the other both for their reduced standard of living and for the demise of the world. (After all, Lenie was personally responsible for spreading ßehemoth.) But this uneasy armistice is about to explode. A new bug has cropped up, labelled ß-Max, and the rifters' immunity to the original plague is not sufficient to protect them against this new incursion. Meanwhile, the corpses, unable to live unprotected underwater like the rifters, are at the mercy of the smallest malicious puncture in their habitats.
Despite her own ill will toward the corpses, Lenie tries to mediate, dealing respectfully with her opponent Patricia Rowan. (Lenie also has a soft spot for Rowan's daughter, Alyx.) She convinces one of her fellow rifters, Rama Bhanderi, to end his plan to "go native" (dwelling perpetually in the sea like an animal) and return to help unravel the mystery of ß-Max. She helps the sufferers of the plague. And she foils a plot to mine Atlantis for destruction. But all her efforts might very well be for naught, since a surface-dwelling enemy seems to have discovered Atlantis, and outright hostilities between rifters and corpses are imminent.
On land, a man named Achilles Desjardins is desperately trying to palliate the destruction that the thrashing nations of the world are inflicting on each other. He calls his job "Entropy Patrol." And it's about to get much harder, thanks to the release by South Africa of a new plague—and the hidden machinations of a rogue AI.
Deadly, mysterious beauty
Peter Watts continues to do a number of things brilliantly here, but I found this volume of his series a tad less compelling than its predecessors.
First off, the winning portions of his novel. He succeeds beautifully in conveying his milieu. The claustrophobia, the constricted life-support modules and the eerie, deadly, mysterious beauty of the seabed are conveyed in finely tuned, poetic prose. This is a very visual book, despite the literal murk and darkness of the ocean depths. To say that this whole series is eminently filmable is not to say it's Hollywood-simpleminded, but only that some genius of the screen would have a heyday with such scenes as Lenie battling hypertrophied sea monsters or cracking open her chest to reprogram her somatic parameters.
The characterization continues to satisfy as well, with Lenie of course being the most complex individual. She's been forced to re-evaluate herself and her goals and methods in the wake of the catastrophe she's engineered, and her painful mental adjustments are palpable. And subsidiary characters like the principled killer Ken Lubin and the S&M-loving "lawbreaker" Desjardins (he violates the laws of thermodynamics) come across vividly. Finally, Watts remains a master of tight, intricate action scenes, staging battles and rescues and explorations like a choreographer.
But what detracts slightly from all this good stuff is the familiarity of the situation and speculative elements, the limited setting and the protracted nature of the infighting. We've gotten to know pretty much everything about Lenie's world in the first two books, and not much new is introduced here. ß-Max is the only novelty, and even that is just an upgrade on the original bug. There's no sense of new frontiers being opened up, just one of old threads exfoliating. True, Lenie's world is a dying one, but the reader nonetheless demands new angles, new insights, new features. Secondly, although Atlantis is beautifully evoked, it's still basically a single stage set. The scenes with Desjardins are too few to compensate for the eventual sameness of the unvarying locale. Lastly, the Machiavellian doings by both the rifters and the corpses are just too ultra-convoluted and drawn out. Like the politics in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, sometimes a little is more than enough.
Still, I fully expect Watts to provide a bang-up finish, as Lubin and Lenie take their war to the surface. They might just save life as we know it—or die trying.
