Peter Watts, Tor Books, copyright 1999
Altering humans in order to live in alien environments isn’t a new concept in science fiction. John Varley, with his symbiotic exosuits, has made a career of it. Peter Watts has surgically and technologically altered his characters to live in the most alien and inhuman environment on Earth: at the bottom of the deep crevices that populate the Pacific Ocean. Three miles or more below the surface, indigenous life is totally unaware of the sun, or tides, or even variations in temperature.
Starfish posits that sending people to live for extended periods in such a strange, dark, lonely place would emotionally and mentally break most people.
So the corporate entities behind the Rift Project came up with a novel idea: send people down there who are already broken to begin with.
The first two Rifters (the subjects of this inhumane experiment) the reader meets are a pedophile who has been beaten and spurned repeatedly, and a woman subjected to emotional, sexual and physical abuse all her life and is shattered as far as self-esteem goes. Unlikely as it might seem, she goes on to be the central character in Starfish, and the subsequent novels in the Rift Trilogy, Maelstrom and βehemoth.
Watts’ characters are as dark and compressed as their environment, and it makes for an emotionally challenging read. Imagine Harlen Ellison coming off a three-week meth bender and pissed because his car is missing. Yeah, kinda like that. You have no mouth and you must scream.
He populates his environment with strange and incredible lifeforms, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them actually exist. It’s commonly said that we know far more about the Moon or Mars than we do about the deep ocean, and less people have been to the bottom of the Marianas Trench than have stood on the Moon.
Starfish is also intellectually challenging. Watts holds a doctorate from the University of British Columbia in Zoology and Resource Ecology, and he often sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to understand some of the concepts he was using to give his incredible world the structure and bones that really good hard SF demands. His is a grimdark reflection of Weir, or Cawdron.
Watts has since written a half-dozen novels, plus several collections of short stories. His 2006 effort, Blindsight, was nominated for a Hugo, and was thus described by British hard SF writer Charles Stross: “Imagine a neurobiology-obsessed version of Greg Egan writing a first contact with aliens story from the point of view of a zombie posthuman crewman aboard a starship captained by a vampire, with not dying as the boobie prize.” (courtesy Wikipedia page).
I plan to work my way through his entire work, just based on the originality and power of Starfish, but I also expect that between reads, I’ll have to come to the surface, blink against the light, and bask in the warmth of the surface sun.