Undersea City

review of
Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson's Undersea City
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 22, 2017

I've been praising Frederik Pohl for a few yrs now - esp his collaborations w/ C W Kornbluth. As far as I can recall, I've never read anything by Jack Williamson before - although I've seen his name many times.

An interesting thing about Science Fiction is the way that scientific data can be explored, somewhat as background, in an action-packed plot that's designed to keep the reader's interest w/o being too drily didactic. Sometimes the science is more interesting to me than the story or it, at least, gives more substance than the story does. That might be the case here.

I found this to be like a Robert A. Heinlein novel aimed at show more teens. I'm reminded of Heinlein books like Space Cadet (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3220256-space-cadet ). Both bks might appeal to a young adventurous spirit, to imagining the challenges of a possible near future - in Space Cadet the challenges of extraterrestrial travel, in Undersea City the challenges of undersea living for humans. Both try to imagine the possibilities using a somewhat reasonable scientific basis. No doubt the basis is too simple to satisfy real scientific rigor but, HEY!, these are novels, not treatises.

I note that Undersea City's copyright date is 1958 but that its 1st printing is shown as April, 1971. What that signifies might be something already addressed by someone more knowledgeable than me. My primitive interpretation of it is that it was written no later than 1958 but didn't find a publisher until 13 yrs later. Why? Maybe Pohl & Williamson didn't promote it, maybe publishers rejected it. If the latter was the case, as it was, e.g., with Philip K. Dick's non-SF novels, then I find that annoying.

Considering the possible implications of the above paragraph gives me the excuse to laud this day & age in wch rejected writers can fairly easily put their own writing on the internet & let publisher be damned. I direct the interested reader to my own "Censored or Rejected" website: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/s mentality.

I'm reminded of a woman that I had the misfortune to live with in 1995. She was young & pretty & I'm sure that those were her main 'qualifications' for the job she had vetting manuscripts submitted for advice & critique to a company that charged for that service. Imagine, you've written a novel & you want 'professional' opinions about it & advice about how to get it published & your manuscript, after you've paid a few hundred dollars, ends up in the hands of a barely literate young woman who could care less about you or doing her job. Now imagine that your novel's title is "Country Airs" or some such & that your main character is a woman with large breasts. The young woman being paid to read your ms says: "Who cares what the air in the country's like?!" because she's too ignorant to know that "air" can also refer to "melody". So much for the expert opinion. &, then, you had the audacity to have your character's breasts be a focus of attention! Well, that makes you a sexist scumbag. Your manuscript doesn't even get read & you're out 4 or 5 hundred dollars. Of course, you don't know that that's the process, your book just gets some short critique that's very negative, you get discouragement for your buck because the anonymous person you've paid is an exemplary shallow dipshit.

But I digress. The main subject of this novel being the threat that seaquakes provide to underwater cities the reader gets plenty of interpolated tech-talk including this acronym explanation:

"He only said: "It was necessary. But I found no one. I believe the sea-car was struck by boulders thrown up in the eruption and disabled. The locks were open. All the scuba gear was gone."

"And that marked him as a true sea-man too, for no lubber would refer to Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus by its nickname, scuba." - p 12

"The word SCUBA was coined in 1952 by Major Christian Lambertsen who served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1944 to 1946 as a physician. Lambertsen first called the closed circuit rebreather apparatus he had invented "Laru" ( acronym for Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit) but, in 1952, rejected the term "Laru" for "SCUBA" ("Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus") Lambertsen's invention, for which he held several patents registered from 1940 to 1989, was a rebreather and is different from open-circuit diving regulator and diving cylinder assemblies also commonly referred to as scuba.

"Open-circuit-demand scuba is a 1943 invention by the Frenchman Émile Gagnan and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, but in the English language Lambertson's acronym has become common usage and the name Aqua-Lung, (often spelled "aqualung"), coined by Cousteau for use in English-speaking countries, has fallen into secondary use. As with radar, the acronym scuba has become so familiar that it is generally not capitalized and is treated like an ordinary noun. For example, it has been translated into the Welsh language as sqwba." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuba_set

Regarding the Welsh, I like to quote an old Welsh proverb (I'm glad to see that someone's pro-verb, I want to see some scuba action around here - but, hey!, wait!, isn't scuba an adjective there?!):

"["] Cefais fy syfrdanu'n syfrdanol, i weled, yn bellter o sawl milltir, ac yn meddiannu cnetre'r arena, strwythur rhyfeddol, a adeiladwyd yn ôl pob tebyg os jâd werdd. Eto, ei hun, nid darganfyddiad yr adeilad oedd mor syfrdanol i mi; ond daeth y ffaith, a ddaeth bob eiliad yn fwy amlwg, nad oedd y strwythur unig yn amrywio o'r tŷ hwn lle rwy'n byw ynddo, heb fod mewn lliw a'i faint enfawr. ["]" - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2127802453

THERE! That's everything you'll ever need to know! You can relax now.. just don't relax toooooo muuuuuccchh or you might start vomiting boulders. Don't you just hate it when that happens?! I broke a Jethro Tull record that way once. I guess I should be glad I didn't make it to the toilet in time because I can't afford to replace my toilet. Vomiting boulders did work to my advantage once though when some blue-boy was pointing a TASER at my SONAR.

Ahem.

The plot hints then thickens.

"Working Model of
Mechanical Ortholytic Excavator
Experimental craft of this type, now under test by the Sub-Sea Fleet, offer the promise of new opportunities to Academy graduates. With it explorations may be made at first hand of the strata beneath the sea bottom."

[..]

"Danthorpe confessed, "Well, all atomic drills generate a lot of heat—and the ortholytic drill cuts faster, but it makes more heat. And the earth's crust is already plenty hot, when you get a few miles down. They've got a terrific refrigeration problem."" - pp 17-18

Have you ever noticed that? Whenever I get an Earth's Crust delivered I won't eat it if the cheese's still bubbling. No sense in burning the roof of my mouth just because I'm so damned hungry.

""Alright you men! Let's get ready to debark!"

"Eskow looked at me and scowled, but I shook my head. Because Danthorpe's name came ahead of our's alphabetically, it had appeared first on the orders—and he had elected to assume that that put him in charge the detail." - p 20

May Alphabeticists be doomed to Lemming Detail, ten hut!

68 pp later:

"Complete data for a really accurate quake forecast would, I believe, require complete information about every crystal—perhaps even every molecule!—in the curst of the earth." [Ok, ok, it really does say "curst" - a lesser writer might've written "wretched"] "You would need to know the temperature and the melting point, the chemical constituents and impurities, the pressure and the shearing strain, the magnetic moment and the electrostatic potential, the radioactivity, the anomaly of gravitation, the natural period of vibration . . . all of those things. And then, having learned them all, you would know only a tiny fraction; for you would have to learn how all of those millions of tiny measurements were changing; whether they were going up or down—how fast—regularly or unevenly. . . ." - p 88

Then again, if you lived in Pittsburgh, you cd just say: "It's going to rain" & you'd probably be right. Are you picking up what I'm putting down? If so, why are you doing that? Are you my servant? This was a predictable novel, the boy gets the girl but then they get arrested for public indecency. show less