Starfish

So, in a radical departure, I read this baby exclusively on my phone. The author has been considerate enough to put the entire trilogy online for free and my phone has a thingy that lets me download books and the book was there so I said, that's me, all cutting edge and cyberpunky and whatnot.

Peter Watts. Not the most cheerful writer. Not your cuddly romantic heroic hard-edge but soft-hearted type of author, and this is not the most cheerful of books, and the whole trilogy's been a downer so far, but what a ride! The whole thing fizzes and pops with ideas and action and great writing, one can almost forget that the whole thing is about the world dying horribly, except Watts NEVER LETS YOU FORGET.

In Starfish, Leni Clarke is a Rifter, show more working at a new power generating station on top of a geothermal vent at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. She has been physically altered to survive underwater at insanely high pressures, but it soon becomes apparent that the physical adaptations were easy. psychological adaptation, on the other hand, is a whole different kettle of fish. Rifters come pre-adapted to high-stress environments. They're the survivors of abuse or trauma. They're also the people who commit abuse and inflict trauma, all mixed together at the bottom of the ocean. It's a volatile mix.

What nobody expects is that the Rifters start to like it down there. The Rifters don't want to leave.

Damaged personalities who may not be human anymore in a high-pressure setting. The most hostile place on Earth, spitting lava and boiling water, teeming with hungry monsters with huge teeth. This is insanely atmospheric, claustrophobic, and scary as heck. I was utterly riveted the whole way through, and I don't actually LIKE reading on my flipping phone. I just had to keep going. show less

In a biotech future of gelatinous AI cubes, exploding human populations, and resource scarcity, Starfish focuses on a crew of mentally unwell deep sea divers, who are altered significantly both physically and mentally to adapt them to the environment of the ocean floor. Their job is to maintain a geothermal energy system on the edge of the Juan De Fuca plate, which teems with gigantic, fragile sea monsters, and unpredictable thermal vents. It's a dangerous job, and an emotionally taxing one, since the entire crew is cramped in the tiny quarters of a dark and creaking substation situated right in the constantly shifting subduction zone.

The crew themselves were selected for the job because of their sordid history with abuse. Both abusers show more and the abused coexist here, creating a fraught set of relationships that develop realistically over the course of the story. I was captivated by most of the characters from beginning to end.

This was Watts' first full length published novel, something you can certainly feel in the prose and structure; it's not perfect in the slightest. Watts writes heavily in dialogue-only mode. Whole passages are nothing but conversations between the rifters, interposed with the internal thoughts of the point of view character. This style grows tedious over time, and can make the work feel more juvenile, even though the subject matter or tone certainly aren't.

A stupendous premise and gripping atmosphere are slightly let down by a lacking second-half where Watts strays into a pacing that he wasn't yet adept at writing. I couldn't help but love it though. This is thrilling, dark, rough around the edges SF at its best. show less

Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse.

I loved Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia, but am just now getting to his first trilogy. In 2050, the world is relying on geothermal power generated at deep, undersea rifts. The men and women running the equipment, 3000 meters below the surface, are surgically modified to stay underwater for extended periods, one lung replaced by an electrolysis machine for oxygen, eyes covered by white image amplifiers. Their neural chemistry is altered to stand up to the high pressure. They live in cramped, air filled habitats at one atmosphere, habitats that probably won't be crushed by the immense weight of the ocean, though the walls creak ominously. While they work outside, in the dark, they must show more guard against attacks from carnivorous sea creatures, and the extreme heat venting from the rift, which could boil the flesh off their bones.

Watts suggests that the people most suited to performing well in such threatening conditions are those who have been living with extreme stress their entire lives - survivors of childhood abuse, who have grown up to replicate their suffering in adult relationships as either abused or abuser. Extreme people under extreme stress is very much Watts's thing, and protagonist Lenie Clarke certainly holds one's attention.

But there are more monsters around the vents than the rifters knew about going in. They, and the exploitive corporations that put them there, slowly become aware of a danger to the entire world, if only it can escape its confinement in the deeps.

Watts has a PhD in marine biology, and, as usual, he provides several pages at the end for discussion of the actual science he rooted the book in. Not all of it convinces; in particular, a shortage of fossil fuel energy isn't something that we need to worry about here in 2020 - we should be so lucky.

This ferocious book ends with devastation, and a promise of more to come in the next volume, Maelstrom. show less

There's a moment of absolute darkness while her eyecaps adjust to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.
They are so beautiful. Lenie Clarke rests on the bottom of the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her. And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.

Only people who are profoundly disturbed, whether abusers or victims, can stand life in the deep sea bases, building and maintaining geothermal power stations along deep sea rifts, even with their bodies adapted to cope with the extreme pressure and absorb oxygen from the water. There are many dangers, from vents suddenly spouting boiling water and attacks by huge but surprisingly show more fragile fish to the instability of their colleagues, but their employers are alarmed when the rifters start to adapt rather too well to their new lives, wearing their skinsuits and eycaps inside the base rather than changing back into normal clothes, keeping the lights low and even sleeping outside the base, and not looking forward to the thought of returning to the surface when their shifts are finally over.

But when danger threatens from below, what are the the lives of the rifters worth compared to those above? Very exciting. Looking forward to the sequels. show less

This is definitely not my first reading of Peter Watts and it sure as hell won't be my last. He's rapidly becoming my total absolute favorite hard SF author. Maybe not quite my top top top choice, yet, but he's getting close enough to kick Alaistair Reynolds off his perch and he makes Stephen Baxter definitely run for his money.

More than anything, I'm in love with the quality. He's wild with the hard SF explorations. Transhumanism and what it means to be human at all in the face of the alien or the alien within us is merely a huge part of his novels but it is not the end. He drives so many of his characters forward with an amazing array of psychology and depravity and simply focused survival.

These guys were transformed to survive 400 show more pressures in one of the deepest trenches in the ocean, to live on the local life, to supply energy to the rest of the world. So who would go down there, fully transformed with biological computers, on their own free will?

Ah, there's the rub. They get marginalized survivors, abuse victims, pedophiles, maladjusted driven iconoclasts.

It makes perfect sense. Send the strongest people we have, the ones we can also sacrifice, and let them do what they do best. Survive at all costs.

Of course, between the psychological pressures, insane real pressure, and creeping maladjustments, you might think this was already a great psychological thriller with enough transformed humanity to keep any SF fan thrilled... but he goes a bit further and gives us the basis and an amazing exploration of a clearly superior and truly alien life form taking up residence down in the trench.

Watts does aliens AWESOME. He gets the concept that alien is probably going to be VERY alien. No blue suit humans, but thoroughly alien across the board.

I LOVE this stuff. Original, well-written, pushing all the boundaries, and it's even full of heart.

To think it's FREE, too! On the author's website!

We really ought to re-think our concepts about popular fiction. Just because it sells super well doesn't mean it's good and just because a book is free doesn't mean it's not brilliant. Popularity is capricious.

This is the kind of novel that blows me away on even the science and species level, not just story or characters. He knows his marine life and even offers up a long biography at the end. Gotta love it. :) show less

It is a fairly diverse book in which, of course, science is the protagonist, but sometimes it also raises philosophical questions, such as Consciousness, Being, Evolution, Thought, Communication, Ganzfeld Effects, Psi Fields, etc. Although Peter Watts himself is a marine biologist, he reads a wealth of scholarly books and articles outside of his field, which he then reports in his notes, this time round right at the beginning of the novel just to make sure you’re made aware that the main ideas in the novel are not a mere fragment of his imagination…original, noirish, intellectual. What more could one ask for?

From Peter Watts we can always expect complex ideas that demand some attention to unravel and it makes the reader consider how show more real is his or her own perceptions of this thing we call "reality." The characters Peter Watts has created are some of the most unique I've read because he takes those ideas to extreme conclusions. Hard SF from the 21st century for sure. And that means something completely different from the heyday of the genre, 30 and 40 years ago. Back then, it was enough to write about realistic spaceships and understand the basics of Newtonian physics and astronomy. Today, from computer science to quantum mechanics to neurobiology, you have to be in many sciences - at least according to Peter Watts, whose SF is one of hardest to read. Science may make the familiar strange, undermine and disturb but SF novels like “Starfish” help people (at least me) re-appraise and reconsolidate some necessary structure in these suddenly new found worlds. Science and fiction are inevitably bound together if done right and this one is almost perfect.

(my edition bought in 2000)
This kind of novel, when done right, simply defines SF for me: it extrapolates from the frontiers of known science or social thinking to create thought experiments that act as warnings or encouragements. Asimov's "Foundation" series was a popularisation of Spengler. It is perhaps a measure of the pace of change in the real world that speculative fiction, science fiction, has a much smaller audience now than fantasy. The future overtakes it as it is being written. But nothing beats SF in my book.



SF = Speculative Fiction. show less

For the first half of the book, Starfish was shaping up to be one of my best sci-fi reads since Leviathan Wakes. Combining remote, hazardous deep sea environment with a larger mystery and character study was riveting, and if that at all sounds appealing, I suggest you try it. In the second half, Watts loses a bit of focus as he brings in larger issues of both physical change and a dystopian mystery.

"Beebe Station floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-gray planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights. There's an airlock for divers at the south pole and a docking hatch for 'scaphes at the north. In between there are girders and anchor lines, conduits and cables, metal armor and Lenie Clark."

Starfish begins with some of the show more best stuff of science fiction, pushing the boundaries of what we know about our environment; humanity living on the edge. Deep in the abyss of the sea, on the Juan de Fuca Rift where two tetonic plates come together, the GA corporation has built Beebe, an outpost for farming geothermals. Only their scientists have found that it takes an unusual sort of person to tolerate living at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, there's the physical modifications, of course--removing the left lung to make room for adaptive equipment, a little gene-splicing to help human enzymes adapt--but more important are the psychological traits that allow some people to cope.

"'I'm fine.' She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's feeling almost sorry for Fischer."

The writing is solid, integrating scientific concepts and world-building with excellent description. The information is very much in the moment and character-focused, so there isn't a great deal of backstory. While this makes sense from one perspective (why would a character think much about the structure of the national government or an energy corporation?), it means that some of the mystery is just from lack of understanding, not actually conspiracy, so it makes the plot actually less dramatic than it could. I loved the setting, with vivid descriptions of a barely-familiar world that make the extreme underwater environment come alive.

"In a few places, the rift is almost gentle. Usually the heat stabs up in boiling muddy pillars or jagged bolts of superheated liquid. Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass. Not here, though. In this one spot, nestled between lava pillows and safe from Beebe's prying ears, the heat wafts up through the mud like a soft breeze. The underlying bedrock must be porous. She comes here when she can, keeping to the bottom en route to foil Beebe's sonar."

There's perhaps three problems here. One challenging issue is that history of abuse/abusers figures strongly into some of the character profiles, including our lead female, Lenie Clarke. Watts tries to integrate some chemical and behavioral issues surrounding abuse into the story with only moderate success. I think there is enough subtlety in the writing to make it acceptable, but I can see where the discussion around abuse might be problematic for some readers.

More significantly for me was how the dual overarching issues were integrated in the second half of the book; plot-wise, they could have benefited from more transition and detail. Instead, we have choppy new viewpoints introduced from one of the very early and peripherally involved scientists and from a chopper flier. I understand what Watts was trying to do, so it is successful enough in that sense, but as a reader, I think it could have been more powerful with more detail. I don't know if I dare say it, but it almost made me wish Neal Stephenson was co-writing. I'll add further thoughts under spoilers.

The last, and most significant problem is that while it can technically be said there's a resolution to Lenie's character arc, the overarching plot threads are left dangling. I think it was resolved reasonably well; as a reader, I didn't really feel cheated. It did make me interested enough in book two that I checked out both reviews and Watt's website, where he has his work available for free. Sadly, the second book is extremely choppy and has trouble developing both a coherent narrative as well as maintaining character focus. I skimmed to maybe a third before I decided I was wasting time. But I think that says something for the conception and plot that it intrigued me that far. Or it might imply that I have book OCD.

There's flavors here that reminded me of Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes, Mira Grant's Into the Drowning Deep, James Corey's Leviathan Wakes and, believe it or not, Resident Evil. That is an almost irresistible combination, and there aren't really good reasons to do so. Recommended for sci-fi fans, with caveats for reader preferences and themes, but for me, a very solid four stars. show less