Maelstrom (novel)

Watts, Peter. Maelstrom. New York: Tor, 2001. Reviewed by Michael Levy, SFRA Review #254-55 (Sept-Dec. 2001): pp. 43-44, on whom we depend for this entry.

In Watt's 1999 novel, Starfish we see, in Levy's words, a "polluted, energy-starved near-future world," and more specifically "the strange goings on in and around a geothermal power station located at Channer Vent deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. The corporation that owned Beebe Station had specifically chosen a crew made up of psychopaths, child molesters, and abuse survivors," i.e., people used to high stress (we'll add, cf. and contrast the crew of insane people in Ursula K. Le Guin's 1971 story, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"[1]). The crew of "rifters" have been "radically altered in both mind and body. Among other things, they’d been made into high-tech amphibians, capable of living under water indefinitely without outside help." It turns out in Starfish that the vent harbors "an enormously ancient and deadly microorganism. The very presence of Beebe Station, it seemed, had accidentally loosed that organism upon the world. Starfish ended with a blast as the Station’s corporate masters tried to solve the problem with a preemptive nuclear strike" (all quotes Levy p. 43).

There are in a sense two survivors of the blast to make it to Maelstrom and North America: the pathogen, called "Behemoth," and a rifter who travels about spreading the disease. Relevant here, "she unwittingly picks up an unexpected ally, a rogue computer program that’s loose on the net" (Levy p. 43).

Levy concludes that, "Maelstrom is in many ways a typical early twenty-first century science-fiction novel," featuring "mind and body modification, anticorporate paranoia, horrific environmental possibilities, killer memes, rogue computer programs, borderline-psychotic antiheroes, and other latter-day cyberpunk tropes [...]"; what makes it stand out is the scholarship and scientific background of the author — symbolized by a formal bibliography.

RDE, finishing, 31Aug10