Frank Schätzing

I thought I was going to love this book. You've heard about it - whales attacking ships, crabs swarming up on the shore in a mass large enough to be seen from a satellite, massive tsunamis. Sounds like a ton of fun! Unfortunately, for every page of thrilling action, there are ten pages of scientists droning on and on at conferences, then going to the bar afterward and hitting on each other. And the technobabble is so repetitive. Twice early on I thought I'd lost my place and was rereading show more something I'd read before. But no, the author felt the need to explain things like methane hydrates and the mirror self-awareness test multiple times in great detail. And in case you didn't get it the first few times, let's have a group of schoolchildren show up at the museum so the scientist can explain it all over again! For every tiny bit of important information you get in this endless conference discussions, there are paragraphs of people expressing doubt and disbelief ("You don't mean to say--?" "Yes, exactly." "But that can't possibly --?" "The facts don't lie." &c) or people spouting tons of tangential but ultimately irrelevant information.

The thing is, and why I give it two stars instead of one, is that there is a TERRIFIC thriller buried in all this logorrhea. At one point, a freaking WHALE leaps out of the ocean and takes out a HELICOPTER!!!! If this book were half as long - or only one third! Someone needs to "Princess Bride" this book. Leave in all the good parts and give a brief summary of the rest. But unlike Princess Bride, feel free to drop the kissing parts. The most compelling relationship in this book was the love/hate bromance between Anawak and Greyeagle. Such as it was.

I thought the good parts would be enough to get me through the rest. And the good parts really are great! But they are so totally drowned out by the tsunami of scientific sophistry that I would really not recommend this book to anyone. If you insist on being stubborn, though, I highly recommend that you skip/skim all the parts where people are talking and focus only on the part with marine life on the rampage. Which, alas, does not happen nearly as often as it should. show less

"The Abyss" meets "The Thing" in this sprawling, exhaustively researched eco-thriller which balances interesting characters and tense plot twists with long pedantic lectures on everything from evolution and theology to deep sea mechanics, personal identity, and biology...and does so in a way that is both informative and hugely entertaining. Despite a few translation glitches (it's spelled "wasn't" not "was'nt" for instance) Schatzing's gift for prose survives largely unscathed while his show more ability to generate tension and a bit of horror is top notch. Environmentalists will cheer, Americans will get the short end of the stick (the author takes special aim at the CIA), and fans of the genre will marvel at how quickly 900 pages goes by. show less

Read: Oct - Dec 2024
Rating: 5/5 stars, best of 2024

Wow! This story is amazing - a detailed, ultra-scientific examination of how a global community could work together to combat a severe ecological threat to humanity. I originally watched the TV mini-series and while I enjoyed it (aside from the way it ended - thankfully the book ending was much better) I felt like half the story was missing. Characters behaved according to the needs of a fairly thin plot and I could sense there was a better show more story somewhere in there that hadn't quite been told.
Then I discovered it was based on an 1,150 page novel and it all made sense!
The Swarm is centred around two main characters - Sigur Johanson, a debonair Norwegian marine biologist and university professor, and Leon Anawak, a young Inuit who specialises in the study of whales off the coast of Canada. There is a whole host of well-rounded, supportive characters - from the ambitious but devious American Judith Li who has the ear of the president, to the chain-smoking SETI scientist Samantha Crowe. There is a villain-turned-hero arc for the Native American dolphin specialist Greywolf, and an underplayed love story between Leon and scientific journalist Karen Weaver. All the while, the underwater threat posed by the Yrr grows ever more dangerous to those on land.
It took me two months to read this book from start to finish and I loved it. While I appreciate the existence of the TV series for introducing me to the novel, I can see just how much of a hugely missed opportunity it was. Hopefully it will one day get the adaptation it deserves. show less

What if the aliens in *The Abyss* weren't friendly? The result is this sweeping eco-disaster thriller that makes for a delightful (if a bit bloated) binge-read. The characters are a somewhat flat (only the Inuit cetologist seems to have any depth, and the novel has to remove him from the action to a personal side-quest to establish and resolve that), but that suits this story that draws its inspiration from Big Disaster Cinema, which it namechecks throughout.