A life under the ocean wave...

It's been a while since the last post, and two hundred boxes of tissues and a gazillion coughing-fits later - it's been that kind of summer so far - I thought I would post something about the background and inspiration for Thalassa: the world beneath the waves. As with Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut, most of the influences lie in the mis-spent hours of my youth, and very few of them are actually literary.

The 1960s and 1970s seem to have been a Golden Age in terms of aspirations for underwater cities and the like. I suspect that much of the motivation for this interest lies at the door of one Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Amazingly for an explorer and scientist, Cousteau was a household name during that time. He was a prolific documentary maker, which probably explains it. There is no modern-day parallel that I can think of, except perhaps the equally amazing Sir David Attenborough, but his career also began in the period when most TVs had a very limited choice of channels. Whatever, however, I grew up on a staple diet of underwater-themed TV shows.

Among the TV addictions of my childhood, there was the Japanese cartoon Marine Boy, one of my earliest TV memories, and something which has never left my head. Then there was of course Gerry Anderson’s Stingray, and Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (TV and film; rebooted as Seaquest DSV). There was also The Man from Atlantis, which quite bizarrely starred Bobby Ewing from Dallas (he was the Man from Atlantis first). Given exposure to those influences, it was probably inevitable that I was going to write a post-apocalyptic-survivors-under-the-sea sci-fi book eventually, and ‘Thalassa – the world beneath the waves’ is it.

The main character is a fifteen year-old girl called Moanna Morgan, and she was the start of the whole idea. That idea was quite simply ‘what if there was a girl who had never seen the sky?’ The reason for that is that the few survivors of humanity live under the sea due to a tectonic apocalypse (the Tectocalypse, in fact; see one of my earlier posts). The Old Earth is no more, and the newly reshaped planet though not quite a waterworld has become 'Thalassa', named after the Greek word for the sea. (In fact, the word Thalassa is not Greek in origin, and nobody really knows where it came from). Not only do the Tethyans live beneath the waves, they never visit the surface. As the book says:

"No-one from the Tethys Colonies had visited the surface for more than a thousand years, and most Tethyans didn’t believe it existed at all. Water all the way up, they said, until you got to Hell itself where the Sun burnt down with its shining rays, peeling the skin from your body, scorching out your eyes, and boiling away the seas to fill what was left with poisonous gasses."

Not exactly the kind of place for a day-trip.

Thalassa is a book that combines that childhood obsession with underwater cities with another idea that fascinates me: the idea of frontiers. Whether it’s the edge of the Wilderland, the Roman Wall that kept some of my ancestors at bay, the Great Wall of China and Asia’s Wild East, or the borderless lands of the American Wild West, frontiers are exciting places. In Thalassa, the explored and inhabited regions – a small part of the American south and mid-west – are called Tethys, another Greek name. Across most of Tethys, the survivors have founded underwater cities – the Colonies – which have banded together into the Tethys Federation. Beyond Tethys lies that part of Thalassa that is known as aqua incognita, unknown water. Aqua incognita is a vast place, and most Tethyan Colonists ignore it. The desire to explore it is left to the Pioneers, another fragment of surviving humanity, who prefer to do things their own way.

Moanna is born into a Pioneer family, but she lives in the up-and-coming Colony of MacGillycuddy’s Reef, north of the Federation Frontier on the edge of aqua incognita. Her identity is split by this background, and through her some of the stresses and strains of Tethyan society become apparent.

But the book isn’t really about any of that. It’s the story of Moanna discovering that the submarine accident that killed her brother didn’t really happen, at least, not as everybody believed. It's a kind of mystery thriller, with a sci-fi background. Of course, in her search for the truth, Moanna makes a discovery that will change not just her life, but the lives of everybody in Tethys forever. The end of the book is just the start of something bigger (if I ever get round to writing the sequel...).

If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can find a few preview chapters on my website. There are Goodreads Giveaways for both Thalassa and Race the Red Horizon throughout June, and after that the Kindle edition will be free from July 1st to July 5th (inclusive). Lid up, and have fun.