The Medusa Chronicles Chapter 1: Encounter in the Deep (parts 2-3)

Looks like this book's chapter system is a bit more complicated than I realized. "Encounter in the Deep" is basically the first arc, and it's divided into seven (mostly very short) chapters. So, that was the prologue and 1.1. Now I'll be covering 1.2-3 to finish this fast lane segment. I'll be continuing the book later on when we get to it in queue.


So, chapter 1.2 begins with the Sam Shore submerging. It can do that, apparently. This ship started as an aircraft carrier built in the 2010's, so...either it was refit into a carrier/submarine convertible, or this story's timeline diverged from OTL early in the 21st century or thereabouts and their naval technology is just more advanced.

The latter seems a lot more likely to me, considering how specialized submarine hulls are. Maybe the authors would have preferred to keep the story in our own possible future, but it's a sequel to something written in the early 1970's, which means real life history has probably already contradicted the original's premises to at least some degree. So, I can see why Baxter and Reynolds might have just thrown up their hands and said "fukkit, this is already alternate history no matter what we do, so let's have fun and put submersible aircraft carriers in 2015."

The descent is graceful enough that most of the passengers don't even notice it at the time. Howard Falcon with his built-in ultrasound sensors and pressurized ballast balloons, however, notices immediately. Since they can't go back on the flight deck after dinner, he and Geoff just go hang out in the service deck just below it. Well, it used to be a service deck; now of course it's a carrier-long shopping mall and food court, plus some extra luxury accommodations. At present, there's also a lot of spaces being given over to a multi-part exhibit courtesy of the World Food Secretariat. 21st century man has fully conquered the ocean, with the sea floor dotted with mining facilities and enormous open ocean plankton farms being fed with organic detritus stirred up from the deeps. It was this new infusion of resources from the ocean that fuelled humanity's victory against climate change, and its biosphere restoration project - including of the heavily impacted ocean itself.

It's impressive work, and the exhibition shows that off pretty effectively. However, while earthly life has been saved, earthly nature is dead and gone. The forests and reefs are all carefully managed ecosystems. The weather patterns are all technologically catalysed. If the active maintenance were to falter, things could spiral very badly once again, and it's not clear if things will ever be able to NOT be like this again. The world's landscape is the human landscape. Its plants and animals, conquered subjects of humanity - even if a few like the uplifted chimps have managed to improve their status above most. It's not earth anymore; it's the human homeworld.

Which is why Howard is starting to feel impatient again, even just less than a year after returning from space. With how every human has acted to him so far in the story, I can't blame him in the slightest.

Howard and Geoff walk and talk. Geoff wishing the ship could go deeper and check out the high pressure operation exercises they're doing for astronauts bound for high-grav environments on the nearby sea floor. However, as Howard points out, the ship can only sink a few meters below the surface. The submersibility is just meant to hide it from enemy aircraft, not for actual submarine operations. Okay, that solves some of the engineering problems with this concept. Not all of them, but some. They are then approached by a woman, Doctor Hope Dhoni, who addresses Howard nervously. He recognizes her as one of the nurses who treated him during the...

Okay. This is getting ridiculous. This isn't making me think poorly of the characters for overfocusing on Howard's trauma anymore. It's making me think poorly of the authors for making everyone and everything in the story so far directly related to his trauma. As if they either can't think of what else to do, or are just trying to shoehorn in as many characters from the Clarke novel as possible as fast as they can. At this point, I'm actually not sure if Howard's nonchalance about all of this is actually meant to show how stoic and detached he is from other people, or if the authors actually didn't realize they were doing this.

Well, anyway. Just like everyone else so far, she immediately starts talking about the crash, and his following transformation. This time, Howard does start getting weirded out. When she claims that she was invited by the President since she's a "friend" of Howard's, Howard calls bullshit on that incredibly implausible assertion. She and Geoff try to change the subject, insinuating that it's just as well that she is here either way on account of his organic components needing a medical checkup; it's been a while, hasn't it? Howard concludes that it was actually Geoff who invited her as his plus one, and that this is all just to get another chance to poke around at him and see what other medical breakthroughs they can test on him via upgrades.

O...kay. Does the text actually want me to think Geoff is in the right, here? He ambushed Howard with yet another reminder of the worst time in his life, after spending the entire day up until then bringing it up and rubbing it in at every opportunity. He invented an (extremely stupid) fake reason for her being here and then pretended not to know about her presence, when he could have just told the truth up front. She barely mentioned anything about his life or her life, aside from a very brief "oh hey I saw your discovery on the news" before jumping into the subject of wanting to open him up.

And I mean, am I really expected to believe that he wasn't already given a medical checkup as soon as he landed? Would they have even let him out in public until they'd given him a full medical checkup, after he spent time in close contact with an alien ecosystem? Hell, I'm pretty sure even normal, modern, non-cyborg astronauts have to get doctor checkups when they come back from space, and there's a lot less that can potentially go wrong with them.


That's the end of the (sub)chapter. I really hope that this arc ends with Howard blowing up the ship with everyone besides him and the chimpanzees on it.


Chapter 1.3 opens in the ship's "sea lounge," a famous recent-ish addition to the presidential yacht. It's a rippling, ribbed chamber that looks like the interior of a seashell. Aquamarines and blue-greens, with a mother of pearl sheen. This piece of experimental architecture was built - or, more accurately, grown - using the same particle deposition technology they use for deep sea dust-mining. The furniture, unfortunately, is just neo-Victorian stuff that clashes with the marine biopunk aesthetic. The motto "mobilis in mobili" - the ship motto for the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - is printed on all the napkins. Oh, I see, they decided to half-ass it and do a 20K Leagues furnishing job in a piece of The Little Mermaid architecture.

Sounds...pretty convincing, honestly. Exactly the kind of cringey shit I'd expect a self-congratulatory government showboat to include.

Then again, Falcon apparently does the closest thing he can do to smiling at this, and murmurs that he thinks Jules Verne would have approved. In a way that doesn't seem sarcastic, and does seem like the voice of the authors.

Sigh...

Up at the podium, poised over the scalloped basin that the audience (including captain Embleton, seated next to the President) are sitting in, is Matt Springer the Pluto guy. Howard reluctantly parks himself in one of the little rounded nooks furthest from the speaker. When Geoff, having seemingly cooled down after the previous chapter's blowup, comes over to sit by him, Howard preempts whatever horrible comment he was going to make with this:

Well, if that's the only way he can fight back, then that's the only way he can fight back. I personally think he could stand to go much further, but it's better than nothing.

Springer starts giving his speech, with this incredibly thick fake charm that seems to work perfectly on everyone except Howard. Howard is annoyed. More than annoyed, actually, Howard acknowledges envy. Apparently he does care at least a little bit about his relationships with other humans, and seeing how easy those are for Astronaut Gaston up there is infuriating. Whatever his presentation is supposed to be about, Springer spends the first part of it rambling about his family history, including harping at length about how he's descendent of another famous astronaut named Seth Springer of Apollo program fame and a humorous digression about his portrayal in the movie that gets a laugh from most of those present.

...

I was about to say that I very much doubt anyone in 2099 is going to even know that there was an Apollo 13 movie, let alone the names of the long-dead actors who starred in it. But then it's mentioned that this movie was made in the 1970's rather than the 1990's, and apparently involved the Apollo program being cancelled because the astronauts were needed to go save the world.

Also, in OTL there was an astronaut named Bob Springer who was involved with the Apollo missions, but not with unlucky 13. Also, Bob and Seth are different names.

Also also, the year of the historical event is given as 1967. So it wasn't even Apollo 13, but Apollo 1. The one that caught on fire during a training session and went up in smoke with all three would-be astronauts inside of it. None of them were named Seth either.

Okay. Timeline is very different from ours, then. Not sure if this detail goes back to the original Clarke novel or not. If so, then Clarke actually was doing an alt-history to begin with, because the book came out in 1971. Why would he have bothered doing that for a scifi novel set more than a hundred years in the future, though?

I really don't know what's up with this. I'll just roll with it for now.

...

Matt Springer finishes his pointlessly long and egotistical speech, and introduces them to the new video/VR documentary about whatever happened instead of the Apollo 1 fire in this timeline. Howard and Geoff get bored of it pretty quickly, and quietly leave the lounge while everyone else is staring at the screens or plugged into their brainjacks. Geoff tells Howard that if they're stepping out anyway, there's someone in the nearby windowed observation lounge who wants to talk to him. Howard asks him if it's Dr. Dohni again. Geoff tells him to stop being such a wiseguy.

They go to the observation lounge. It's Dr. Dhoni.

Oh my god Howard just put Geoff through the observation window seriously.

They approach her table, and the conversation - their first one since Howard got mad and she ran away whimpering in the previous chapter - begins like this:

Because that's not subtextually communicating anything.

The very next thing is Hope commenting on the remarkable work of engineering that is the underwater observation window, and following it up by mentioning that Howard is a remarkable work of engineering himself. Oh my god please kill me. Or better yet, kill her. The text goes on to describe the window on its own at considerable length, as well as the sea sprite drones swimming through the dark water outside of it. Once again, Howard is getting anxiety due to drones zooming around outside of a vehicle he's on and no one cares.

Then Howard apologizes to Hope for the way he acted before, and seems to mean it.

-____-

At this point, it really does seem like the authors actually don't realize what they've been doing this whole arc. I was sure it was deliberate back when I finished 1.1, but I guess I was wrong.

I'm sure they did intend for the other characters to come across as a little bit insensitive, but not nearly to this degree. With Springer it's intentional, and the other characters all agree that he's a jerk so that's not a story issue, but I don't think the authors realized that they were only writing him as VERY SLIGHTLY crueller than everyone else.

And you know, with how much more description the (largely irrelevant) technical details of the ship are getting than anything else, I feel like the characters all being obsessed with Howard's cybernetics is just a reflection of the authors' own interests and limitations. I've only read a couple of short stories by Baxter and/or Reynolds in the past, so I can't say very much more from personal experience, but looking at their bibliographies they're both big names in the "hard scifi" subgenre. A genre that frequently gets criticized for being all about technology-wank and myopic futurism, with the human element only included by grudging necessity.

It's kinda funny, and also kinda refreshing to be honest. I make my jokes at the expense of "nerds," but reading this is a good reminder of what that word used to mean as opposed to what it means now. There's no stupid pedantry, or unconvincing hypermasculine posturing, or weird misogyny, or excessive pop culture cannibalism. Just obsession with science and technology and a poor grasp of social interaction. It's wholesome, in its way. A reminder of back when "nerd" referred to a type of person you could sometimes root for.

Anyway, the chapter ends with Howard choking back his anxiety and starting whatever conversation Hope and Geoff want him to have. And that's that for this month's fast lane.


This book will probably get better when it gets back to the Jupiter aliens and the uplifted chimps and makes them its main focus. So far, I'm mostly just infuriated on Howard's behalf and experiencing emotional dissonance when he isn't infuriated himself.

It's been a long time since I read "Childhood's End," but I don't think Arthur C. Clarke himself had these problems. If he did, then it at least wasn't nearly as pronounced.

So far, my verdict on this book is "wake me up when the talking chimps are back."