Profundis

A fairly light but still toothy SF satire, with mad captains, toadying underlings, a sentient AI, dolphins, social commentary and a hapless innocent bumbling around in the midst of it. A good reminder that Richard Cowper is very much worth reading.

I reread this short novel infrequently; I quite enjoy it, but I don’t understand what the author was trying to do with it. It’s set on board an enormous British submarine containing a whole self-sufficient society, which survives a global nuclear war underwater, and stays there.

It tells the story of 17-year-old Tom Jones, an undernourished dolphin handler who is near the bottom of the social scale. He’s endearingly innocent and naïve, but there’s more to him than meets the eye, and for various reasons he becomes the centre of attention.

The story is partly comic, and quite amusing, but it also seems to be attempting some kind of social commentary.