Starfish by Peter Watts
Three kilometers underwater, on the ocean floor, this is a story set in almost perpetual darkness, and it never really lets you back up to the light, the rifters end up not looking forward to the thought of returning to the surface. The premise is grim and brilliant: power stations set on underwater rifts and then operated by sociopaths evolved to survive in those conditions is the basic setup, workers surgically adapted to a deep sea living environment to breathe seawater, and it turns out only people who are profoundly disturbed, whether abusers or victims, can stand life in the deep sea bases, the ones already psychologically damaged to crave danger and pain. The corporation has deliberately... selected psychologically damaged folk for this job. He is a marine biologist and it shows, and how detailed the science is struck me first, all that teeming, glowing life in the abyss, and I somehow picture the cramped station as a small version of the oilrig in The Abyss, that same sickening, claustrophobic feel. The psychology is more unsparing still, most of the book delving deep into the twisted psychology of the Rifters, and the crew member I could not shake was a child molester who has a continuous internal dialogue with a victim, and maybe I'm just too shallow to accept that a pedophile/child-killer can be a sympathetic character, but Watts asks you to sit inside that head, which is a lot to ask?? It got dark and disturbing in a way that I just wasn't interested in reading, and I almost put the book down there. Then there is the other intelligence, the biological computers, or 'head cheese', cultured brain tissue that functions as a literal neural network and learns without a traditional consciousness and makes cold flat choices, and there is a chilling beat where I realised the consequences as soon as the gel picked its favourite game, before anyone onscreen does. My reservation: it seemed as though the book changed raw materials mid-stream and transformed into a different structure altogether, there is the switch between the psychological character study first half and something that in the last stretch went completely geological, an intimate and claustrophobic apocalypse, a thing in the mud where together they might change everything, and I lost train of what was at stake between the characters. The final act feels a little bolted on, it seemed to occur outside the scope of the tale being told. But as a portrait of trauma and pressure, of the kinds of people we would actually send to the worst places, it is dark, depressing, but absolutely fascinating, altogether a very memorable read. I did not enjoy it in any normal sense, but it is gorgeously done, and the characters are what kept me turning pages, at some point I couldn't put it down.