- The Good: Ambitious hopeful hard scifi combined with the human condition
- The Bad: Slow and uneven; minimal character development
- The Literary: A smart scifi well deserving of its awards
Leigh Hasenbosch, an accomplished microbiologist, launches her career by investigating a newly discovered deep ocean vent thought to be three times deeper than the Mariana Trench. From the ocean depths, to the dry Mojave desert, to the stars, Leigh seeks to understand the origins of the human race.
The novel begins with Leigh’s backstory, following both her professional and personal life mostly chronologically. Leigh grew up in Rotterdam in the near future with her mathematician mother and hydraulic engineer father and her younger sister Helena. Rotterdam has an elaborate network of dikes and dams that hold back the rising sea levels in this near future amid escalating climate change. Leigh always loved exploring the waters around her house as a child, and she and her sister would often also use them to escape their abusive father.
Leigh studies marine ecology and microbiology at university, then follows that with graduate studies at the Max Planck Institute. As a young professional, she explores and studies underwater thermal vents in the Caribbean. To her delight, Leigh and her colleagues are tasked with testing a NASA-developed underwater vehicle that will one day be deployed to explore the oceans on Europa.
Those last two paragraphs are my dry summary of Leigh’s life, but in the novel, they’re buoyed by Leigh’s first-person perspective, particularly her love and excitement of science and being on the edge of discovery. Years of daily rigorous research ground the story, and disagreements are inevitable working with teams of other scientists. But the work culminates in something so special, and you feel Leigh’s passion. This is science fiction reminiscent of Contact, in which science itself is mysterious, numinous, and full of wonder and possibility.
The wonder of the deep ocean and the wonder of space come together in this novel, and you realize how similar they are. The discovery of the unknown, yes, but also the environment inhospitable to humans, including the psychological toll these places take on those leaving behind the worlds they know.
Speaking of the psychology, I love the parallels drawn between Leigh’s career and her family life, and I’m reminded of Story of Your Life and Others aka Arrival. The best scifi is also very human. Leigh spends most of her time thinking about the origins of human life, but she also reminisces about her own childhood and upbringing, finding the roots of her own interests, tendencies, and to some extent, her own hangups.
But the reader sees even more. Leigh propels herself through her career, letting it envelope her days entirely. She feels guilty when Helena calls asking her to visit their mother, who is slowly falling ill with dementia, but Leigh can’t bear to take any time away. I would argue that Leigh’s passion consumes her just as dementia does her own mother, and Helena is left to pick up the pieces of their broken family, but neither Leigh or Helena fully heal from their childhood traumas.
I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, but the last section of the book is quite jarring. Be warned, the POV shifts away from Leigh to Helena, back on Earth’s surface, performing the activities of a normal human life. The reader is removed from the grand sweeping mission of discovery back to the mundane. The author doesn’t want to leave the reader in the unknown and inhospitable, because despite its thrills it’s also risky; instead, he returns us to home and business of living, and the rest of the human race.
This is a quiet and measured book. To enjoy it, you’ll need patience for slow-moving, lengthy descriptions of scene and lots of conversations about scientific experiments. I’ll admit it’s verbose and a little overwritten. There’s little-to-no character development, and little-to-no change in pace. The childhood trauma represents all of Leigh’s tragedy, and I think her character deserves a little more motivation.
Instead, this is a book that focuses on themes. Distance and connection, space and claustrophobia, darkness and light. There’s a moment when Leigh is floating in the sea above the trench her team is investigating and has the sensation that the stars above her are the same distance as the bottom of the sea. This is the sort of story that leaves you in a luminous reverie.
I can see why this novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year in 2024. This story feels like classic reverent human scifi. Recommended for anyone who sees poetry in the vastness of space, the minutiae of the microscopic, and the depths of the human soul.