Customer Reviews

The Watch Below

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am writing this review from memory of one of my favourite sf titles, so apologies for any errors. This story follows two separate yet similar threads. Firstly, a world war 2 cargo ship sinks to bottom of ocean and its 5 remaining inhabitants miraculously manage to find a way to survive in their very limited ecosystem. (OK, this does require some suspension of disbelief but it's amazing what you can do with a few bean plants, a dynamo for light, and a very large stock of canned food!) As two of the inhabitants are female nature follows its course and we end up following the lives of generations to whom the surface above has become a myth.

Meanwhile, an exodus of spaceships fleeing a dying planet faces its own problems. The crew was to spend most of the centuries long journey in cryosleep, with periodic awakenings to check controls etc. Unfortunately the freezing process is discovered to cause brain damage if repeated too often, so the only solution is for a small number of crew to remain permanently awake, over many generations.

As with his Sector General novels, some of the main protagonists are the ships' doctors, and the interactions within the two communities are sympathetically and engagingly plotted. I'm not going to say any more about the plot, as it's fairly easy to guess where the aliens will end up! As a stand alone book, I prefer this to the Sector General series, and I am very glad it has received a well-deserved reprint. (Now I don't have to try to steal my parents' copy!)

I stumbled across James White when I was a young teen and I adored his sci fi titles. He brings alien cultures and personalities to life, and his writing is full of conflict, crisis, action, logic, and problem solving that is hallmark of any good sci fi novel.

I discovered my love for scifi in the late nineties so I read all the greats at around the same time with fresh eyes. I was always surprised that James White wasn't as well known and well read because to me his work is just as entertaining as Heinlein and Asimov - different, don't flame me, I'm not comparing him to them - but very entertaining and readable.

Front cover: `The handful of survivors could be saved- but only by aliens who were a mortal threat to the rest of humanity!'

Rear cover: `Somehow they had to find a way... Doc Radford, the Exec, Wallis, and the First Officer Dickson, together with two badly injured and hysterical nurses. They were stuck. In the pitch dark, bleak cold of a hull equipped with oxygen tanks and stored food. And nothing else. Under several fathoms of water. Somehow they had to find a way to stay sane long enough to make a new home. And billions of miles out in space there were aliens- water breathers whose own world was gone forever in gusts of titanic heat. They too had to find a way- a way to survive for generations, long enough to find a new home... Aliens and human alike had the same problem. This is how they met.'

The five humans are struck by torpedoes in 1938 and their ship is partially submerged. They must eek out a living with very limited resources including generators, oxygen tanks, beans, and canned food. Even surviving for one year on these materials would have been beyond belief but White pens the story through numerous generations, which falls into the realm of oh-come-on! By grudgingly putting believability aside, the story can read pretty well. In parallel to this is the more believable alien exodus. These hydro-origin beings are on a course to a star many years away so they must put themselves into a cryo-sleep to wait out the trip. One flaw: it doesn't seem to work right in space and successive periods of sleep render the awoken less and less intelligent. Solution: an impromptu generation ship to guide the fleet to the star.

Reading the paralleling stories is gripping, something which cannot be said for White's Lifeboat novel which features human passengers fleeing from a destroyed space liner. Putting believability aside and reading about the similar plights between the alien planet-escaping exodus and the human struggle to survive though dim in prospect.

It was all a great read until, `This is how they met.' It was pretty much downhill in the last 15% of the book when earth's military becomes involved and distracts the continuity of the parallel stories. The concept of the analogous stories is the key feature (again, putting aside the oh-come-on feeling). White is also tongue in cheek about the characters attitude towards the possibility of having to stay in the sunken ship for generations and the pair-bonding they will have to do. Unlike many authors of the same era, White skirts the issue with conversation-studded `umms' and `ers' and `wells' without losing traction from the plot flow.

James White, famous for his Sector General series, spins a disturbing tale of two isolated and decaying societies -- one alien, one human. Without doubt the work demands a certain suspension of disbelief. The isolated human society half of the premise comes off as highly artificial/improbably/impossible (and, well, bluntly put, hokey). I found the alien half of the story line a more "realistic" situation but less emotionally involving as the human half. White has difficultly meshing the trans-generational nature of both story lines -- and the inevitable intersection at the end is predictable, anti-climactic, and dents the great appeal of the central portion of the work.

Lest this dissuade you, White's dark vision is a transfixing take on the generation ship (literally) -- how would a society descended from five individuals evolve for a hundred years trapped in the hull of a vessel deep underwater with only a memory game, the groans of the hull, a flicking garden light, piles of dried food, a generator, and intense cold to keep them occupied? "The Game had become so much a part of their lives that it would have been harder to stop playing it than it would have been to stop breathing" (116).

Brief Plot Summary (some spoilers)

In the year 1942 German submarine sinks a special anti-submarine cargo ship. Thankfully the vessel contains huge stores of food and supplies and a special re-enforced hull. The three men and two women (one wounded) trapped below expect to be rescued at any moment but soon realize that it's not probable. This is by far the least interesting section of the novel detailing how they figure out how keep at each others throats, couple-off discretely, and survive (they keep the air clean with a garden, set up a generator, huddle under sacks to keep warm, try to calm the hysterical women, have children, etc.). And set up The Game... To remain sane each person recalls the smallest details of books (C. S. Forester's Hornblower Series, the Bible, pulp sci-fi, etc), childhood events events (birthdays, etc), everything... It evolves into more than an obsession - the only source of knowledge accessable for the future generations.

After the descendants of the first generation enter the fray, White enters disturbing (and fascinating) territory. Not only have the descendants never been outside but their entire world view is premised on the information passed down by the Game -- i.e. what tidbits their parents happened to remember. Eventually some question the veracity of the information in the Game at all. And of course, at least one member of each generation dreams of escape -- and tries. All the while the windows cloud over with algae, diseases ravish their malnourished bodies, the hull rusts, the lights run out (and the generator slowly stops working), and the cold grows more and more oppressive...

The parallel story line chronicles the generations of an ocean dwelling alien species (who generally act like humans). The oceans on the aliens' world were evaporating due to the growing temperature of their sun -- desperate measures are taken. The aliens pour all their resources into the construction of gigantic generation ships. The passengers of the ships are cryogenically frozen and expect to be woken up in cycles to operate the vessels... However, they soon discover that repeated thawing has a detrimental effect on the mind. Another plan is hatched -- a small group of aliens on the flagship will remain unfrozen and create a society to maintain the ship on its journey to a new ocean world.

The new ocean world is Earth!

Final Thoughts

White purposefully inflicts the same forces on both the isolated alien and human societies - genetic degradation (diseases, compromised intelligence, etc) and societal changes due to the ship becoming "the world." However, I never felt like the aliens were sufficiently alien -- which I surmise is White's point. All sentient life will respond similarly when presented with desperate situations.

Despite the inherently ridiculous situation of humans living for a hundred years underwater in a "special" cargo ship, I found their story line (especially The Game) fascinating and emotionally involving -- there's a scene where the descendants listen to the helmet of a boy trying to escape scrapping along the bottom of the vessel which gave me the chills. When the story lines intersect White is too hasty tying up all the strings -- 189 pages for a trans-generational and trans-species narrative is not enough!

Recommended.

This book was one my brother had that I read many years ago. I found my old copy and it was pretty shot. Glad to have found and good copy and throughly enjoyed reading it again. It is an incredible story.