Review: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

I picked up this one thinking that it was going to be one of those adapted-classics-with-a-twist, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Android Karenina.

It isn’t.

In 1958, the submarine Plongeur had just begun its maiden voyage when the ballast tanks, steering, and engine all experienced catastrophic failure at the same time. The vessel and its entire crew sank and kept on sinking, past the point where the pressure should have crushed the submarine, past the point where it should have hit the ocean floor, continuing on its unstoppable dive while the depth gauge insisted they’d gone thousands of miles deeper than the diameter of the planet.

Adam Roberts’s Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea by Adam Roberts is a sci-fi disaster adventure and a horror story with touches of Lovecraft. Other than the title and the setting it has next to nothing to do with Jules Verne, until suddenly it does, and then the madness of the crew and a decades old story and conflicting political alliances all meet in an impossible setting created by a godlike being who is either trying to destroy Earth or conquer it. And the ending is equal parts hypothetical science and poetry, so I’m still not quite sure what the heck it was all about.

The book is hard to describe, is what I’m saying. “Weird” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

                      Death is an ocean.

Almost half the book takes place aboard the Plongeur as it sinks (or is pulled) impossibly far, impossibly fast. This really feels like the heart of the story: the twelve-man crew (well, nine plus two nuclear scientists and one government observer) and how they react to each other and the ongoing disaster. There’s one brief moment where everyone is united, when they’re all convinced they’re about to die, and they all take turns sharing a packet of cigarettes, praying, and blurting out confessions in what they think are the last few seconds before the pressure of the ocean flattens the vessel and everyone inside. And then the crushing pressure slowly backs off, and the crew is left with the endless fall and the fact that no one really seems to like or trust most of the other people onboard.

You really get the sense that this crew could have destroyed themselves just from a short trip underwater, even without the disaster. Captain Cloche doesn’t trust the government observer, Alain Lebret, since the captain didn’t get a choice about Lebret coming along. Lebret is keeping secrets from the captain and the crew, and occasionally from the two Indian scientists he’s supposed to have been working with. The two Indian scientists ( the only ones who understand the nuclear heart of the submarine) don’t really know how to behave aboard a submarine, and their nationality means the crew probably wouldn’t trust them much even if they did. The Ensign, Billiard-Fanon, is excitable and easily led; the cook spends as much time as he can dead drunk. The fact that they’re all trapped together  – after what must have been an act of sabotage – and have no way of stopping their dive and finding their way home means that anger and paranoia start setting in even before the laws of physics start falling apart.

Twenty Trillion Leagues - coverThe strangeness of the world that the submarine has been pulled into is where Roberts shows his greatest strength. Objects inside the submarine randomly leap into the air, papers fly about in mysterious breezes, and the lid of one seaman’s storage trunk keeps throwing itself open until someone thinks to turn the trunk upside down. Air bubbles that escape the vessel stay floating next to the submarine even while it continues to fall, and at the same time any water spilled inside the vessel will hang in midair or crawl along the ceiling. Lebret and the two scientists try to figure out how they can keep falling deeper and deeper in this mysterious ocean while the pressure outside stays at a bearable level. The best explanation they can come up with is that there wouldn’t be any pressure if there’s no gravity to pull down the mass of water, and the only way for there to be no gravity inside an ocean is if they’re dealing with an infinite amount of water. And even that doesn’t explain why there’s still enough gravity inside the submarine to keep the crew upright and not floating.

Bad enough having to deal with the mind-bending idea of a never-ending ocean that they will fall through forever. Add to that the appearance of mysterious underwater suns that boil the water for miles around, and then attacks by monsters with strangely human features, and it all pushes everyone over the edge. Terror turns into violence, drunkenness, religious mania, truly horrible decisions (Lebret, didn’t you take even one first aid class?) and a kangaroo court with the presiding judge throwing tin mugs at the defendants whenever they try to talk. The body count racks up and absolutely no one is safe; you can almost see bits and pieces of everyone’s sanity breaking off and flying away, like a rocket coming apart in reentry.

After the madness of the descent, the reveal of the power behind the whole journey feels like a completely different book. There’s more long discussions of the scientific theory behind the nature of different dimensions and how they’re interlocked, we learn the backstory of the Plongeur, there’s at least one or two angry rants about political affiliations which don’t feel like they have any relevance to anything, other than to demonstrate how the endeavor was probably doomed from the start. The whole section dragged interminably and moved too fast to assimilate everything.

I have such mixed feelings about this book. I like horror that’s both weird and really really creepy, and Roberts certainly comes up with some very strange and deadly situations in this book. The strangeness works, but sometimes the explanations bogged things down. You have to be very careful about writing passages that include phrases like “Personally, I incline to the opinion that space is actually a three-dimensional manifold, two spatial modes and one temporal mode of extension,” if you don’t want to leave your readers behind. I thought the concept of the story was extremely clever, but eventually it felt like it was just being weird for it’s own sake By the ending of the book I could tell that Adam Roberts is a huge fan of Jules Verne, but I’m still not sure how everything worked out the way it did, and what it all meant.