Starfish

Canadian Sci-fi author Peter Watts' amazing first novel isn't a poor story of soft love and comfort. It doesn't have kiddie dragons or friendly aliens or mystical creatures. It doesn't stop on a line to pacify a more conservative audience. It might just be the best book yet.

Starfish is a novel of insanity, rape, pedophilia, awareness, darkness, oppression, uprising, death, murder, impending doom, technological ignorance, the deep, dark ocean and its benthic monsters, Ganzfeld effects, artificial intelligence, and the approach of the next great extinction: that of the human race.

Watts' doesn't embrace the stereotypical heroes, the super-human protagonists, but rather fills his cast with those individuals that mankind prefers not admit possession of. The book follows Lenie Clarke, a victim of sexual-abuse, who is sent to work at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean maintaining a deep-sea power station. It is through her eyes that the reader watches her development, watches as the station fills with others just like herself; wife-beaters, pedophiles, society's "sickos."

Try as the world might to forget them, its attention must soon be bought back to the depths, as these "Rifters" put to work at the world's bottom soon pose a global threat. A threat even the Rifters themselves are unaware they have become.

More than any other book I have read, Watts' writing fully envelopes the reader in the scene, allows glimpses into the actual thought processes, provides realistic characters to associate with, and situations familiar to many readers. I have re-read Starfish more times than I can remember, and enjoyed it more and more each time. It has earned a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and I am sure I will be reading it again in the near future.

So go buy this book. Read it. Spread it. As the author himself suggests: "why not pick up other [copies] and hand them out to Jehovah's Witnesses at street corners?"

Buy / Author's Site / Wiki

Or you could be cheap, and read the book online,
where the author has posted it for free.