Starfish

The premise sounds like it shouldn’t work when you say it out loud, a corporation surgically altering people, most of them survivors or perpetrators of their own abuse, to live and work at the bottom of the ocean managing an energy source pulled out of hydrothermal vents, on the theory that people already broken by trauma handle isolation and pressure better than anyone stable would. Watts commits to that logic completely instead of softening it, and the result is one of the more genuinely unsettling casts of characters I’ve read in hard SF.

I noticed a lot of the actual excitement, the parts you’d expect a thriller to lead with, stays in the background for most of the book while the foreground is close, uncomfortable character study of people who are gradually becoming more comfortable in an environment built to kill them, and more comfortable with each other in ways that aren’t always healthy either. It’s a slow build, and I kept expecting the plot to surge forward and it mostly didn’t until the last stretch, when a very large problem finally comes to a head.

What kept me reading through the slower middle was how real the science felt, actual studies from marine biology and psychology behind the deep sea technology and the trauma responses on the page, and Watts includes his own notes on where the ideas came from, which I always appreciate in hard SF, it’s the difference between made up jargon and real terms you can look up and have them hold together. The pressure of the setting comes through physically too, more than one description of the hull sounds and depths made me aware of my own breathing while reading.

Not a book for everyone, it’s bleak and the cast is hard to like on purpose, but if you want science fiction that trusts you to sit with discomfort instead of resolving it neatly, this delivers.