Those curious about the book should consult the cited reviews. The novel is not plot-driven; the storyline's focus is on a proposal to construct in French Polynesia factories for creating habitats that can be used for "seasteading" the ocean. What the author provides is an in-depth study of the people destined to be involved in this venture, from their childhoods in our lifetimes to the conclusion in a near alternate future. I was impressed by the author's obvious research not only into all aspects of oceanography, but also into artificial intelligence.
Herewith some excerpts of memorable passages (page citations from the hardback first edition):
"A leatherback, she'd once read, must cry two gallons of water every hour, just to keep its blood less salty than the sea." (15)"On the one night of the year when the moon's cycle and the temperature of the water both declared their undecodable now, the whole reef exploded in a heave of joyous sex. All the colonies in every direction for as far as Evie could see shot their trillions of sperm and egg into the sea at once... As the flecks eddied all around her, something in Evie whispered, I could die now. I have seen the relentless engine, the inscrutable master plan of Life, and it will never end." (112)"Just remember. Impossible decisions are really the easy decisions.""Wait, what? Is this some kind of deep feminine wisdom?"..."If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn't matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.""For several seconds, Didier cold not decide if what his wife had just said was banal and absurd or the single insight that his entire life had been struggling toward, the one that would solve all the flaws of his temperament and leave him enlightened..." (279)"I worked for the love of it, the sheer joy... to escape the hell of my family and to make a good thing out of nothing. The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers." (304)"She did her best to depict the baroque, astonishing architectures of creatures who made up that three-fifths of the ocean biomass too small for humans to see." (318)"She had grown old, older than half of the world’s current countries. She had seen the collapse of the infinite fisheries off the Grand Banks, observed the disappearance of snow crabs from the Bering Sea, watched miles-wide drag nets dredge up in one afternoon coral cities that had taken ten thousand years to grow, seen the global sea acidify, watched most of the world’s reefs bleach white, and witnessed the start of nodule mining that would rip the heart from the living deep. She had lived to see trash at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the remotest places on Earth turned into resorts, the Gulf Stream wavering, and a photic zone too hot to mix, leaving the nutrients trapped in the layers below. Nine-tenths of large life is missing, and the rest filled with heavy metals. The largest part of the planet exhausted, before it was ever explored.” (348)
And some words that were new to me (or that I had forgotten...):
"Here he was, so close she could feel his wake: a great chevron-morph goliath she called the Loner." A wide V-shaped form, from the Old French chevron, so called because it looks like rafters of a shallow roof [here referring to a manta]."She let loose a whispered stream of joual invective so vile..." The dialect of working-class Quebecers."The cleaning station would soon become a lekking site, with gangs of hopped-up males circling the edges..." An aggregation of male animals for the purposes of courtship and display, from Germanic roots meaning "play.""He was no great student of cleromancy, and his father, the miner, had mocked it as a superstition that united peasants and elites." Divination by throwing dice or any such marked objects, like beans, pebbles, or bone, from the Greek for "a lot."
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