Product Description

So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometres below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have pre-adapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place. It's a small price to keep the lights going, back on shore.But there are things among the cliffs and trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find, and enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made of iron. At first, not even the rifters know what they have in them - and by the time anyone else finds out, the outcast and the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115334 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"No one has taken this premise to such pitiless lengths--and depths--as Watts.... In a claustrophobic setting enlivened by periodic flashes of beauty and terror, the crew of Beebe Station come across as not only believable but likeable as they fight for equilibrium against their own demons, one another, their superiors and their remorselessly hostile surroundings." - The New York Times"

Customer Reviews

Future thriller needs a sequel
Not that I wasn't satisfied with it as it was. Believe what the author tells you - this book plays like an underwater Blade Runner. It's glum. There's no hope. Everything's dank and dreary and there's not one character you'd like to have as a close friend. I like that in a book - feels real, like a dysfunctional crew on an off-shore oil platform (at least they're not unionized, that would be worse).

Anyway, the best thing about this book is the science, particularly the author's in-depth speculation on "how to get a human to live several miles under water". Everyone's seen the Abyss. I'm sure the author was chuckling watching Bud Brigman descend the fathoms and still survive, even with that transluscent pink oxygenated flurocarbon swill in his lungs. That scene may have been the author's impetus. Or maybe Deep Star Six.

The pyranosal RNA thing, however....not too keen on that. Seems like the author was looking for an excuse to keep the deep-sea-ers down there, and the author pulled that from his nether regions. Doesn't matter.

Anyway - I wander. Great book. Good writing. Accurate science (I'm a biochemist). Compelling and scary characters. And there will be a sequel. There has to be. I look forward to it.

Inventive and worth reading, if you can put up with the shonky ending
Starfish explores a somewhat similar setting to his later novel Blindsight. The characters are even more dysfunctional and hateable than in the later novel, and the first three quarters of the book are inventive. Unfortunately, the end falls into the rather tired cliche of an Evil Corporation oppressingthe characters For The Good Of Humanity. A shame. Mind you, it does give him a hook on which to hang the next story in this trilogy.

Dark Cyberpunk!
If there were to be a film made of this novel it would start "in a world....blah blah".

Lennie Clarke is an abused, disaffected, sociopath with few redeeming qualities. When she offered a job opportunity that will require her to be fitted with biomechanical implants (as well as having her genetic make up altered) which will allow her to breath sea water and withstand the crushing pressures of 300 atmospheres she jumps at it. Unfortunately for her she won't be alone....the vessel she is working in thousands of metres below the sea contains other miscreants and psychopath's, otherwise known as rifters. So why choose them? Their job is to work on the Channer Vent in the Juan De Fuca rift, a goethermal site with massive potential for the Corpses (Corporate elite). Unfortunately for the world something has been lving in the vent for a lot longer than humanity and disturbing it could cost the earth...literally.

This book is dark and brooding and the sense of crushing claustraphobia is palpable. Most of this first book (there are three others in the Rifters Series) is focused around life in Beebe Station for the Rifters, and a psychotic bunch they are to. Paedophiles, murders and abuse victims (i think you get the picture.

Watts paints a picture of a future world where the big company's call the shots and they don't care who they trample to get what they want. I've read Maelstrom which takes a really nifty Noir direction to good effect.

A top read from an Author who has not been so prolific in his writing.