Involution Ocean

by Bruce Sterling

The entire habitable portion of Nullaqua lies at the bottom of an immense crater 70 miles deep, 500 miles across. The rest of the planet is dead.

How quickly can a person climb? Two miles a day? You would be two miles above sea level before you were even over the boulders at the foot of the Nullaquian crater. After two days of climbing you would find it impossible to breathe. The sky would turn black before you were halfway up the cliffs. After a month you would be climbing rocks undisturbed for four billion years.

And yet... something lives down there at the bottom of that ocean of dust. Something cool and watchful. No one talks about it on Nullaqua.

All this... and the crew of the dustwhaler Lunglance... make up this strange and memorable world.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Cyberpunk, Adventure, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fantasy

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, critic and a contributing editor of Wired magazine. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns and introductions to books by authors ranging from Ernst Jünger to Jules Verne. His non-fiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003) and Shaping Things (2005).

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harlan Ellison introduced Bruce Sterling to the world with his support for 'Involution Ocean' (1977), Sterling's first novel, praising it in his introduction with such hyperbole that Sterling must have cringed when he read it. Nothing, surely, could be that good!

In fact, the book is very good indeed. It is puzzling that it has disappeared from view since, perhaps because Sterling is so associated with the later movement of cyberpunk that re-selling something by him that was not cyberpunk might be difficult. Who knows how publishers think?

That Sterling wrote this book when he was only 21 (it took two years to publish) makes it all the more striking because what he has done is transform Moby Dick, one of the oft-cited candidates for the the 'Great American Novel', into a science fiction novel that is not mere pastiche.

Far from it. Sterling takes themes that come no doubt from a wider love of literature and culture - science fiction as genre, Melville of course, Frank Herbert's 'Dune, vampire lore, Jules Verne, perhaps William Burroughs - and creates something new.

There is even the insertion near the end of Golden Age Kuttnerian cosmic apocalypticism albeit as possible delirium. And does one detect the Voyage of the Beagle and Baron Frankenstein as well as Ahab in the exploits of Captain Nils Desperandum?

It manages to be fantastic and weird - most clearly in one of the most finely drawn and sensitive portrayals of an alien in the winged Dalusa, desperate to be accepted by humanity - and yet give an impression of realism once the fundamentals of the planet and its biology are accepted.

The world he creates, Nullaqua, is closed and yet part of a massively wider universe of trade relations. A very large crater with a million people on islands in a vast sea of sand with its own ecology mimicking the ecology of our oceans and, of course, reminiscent of the deserts of Dune.

The invention of its life forms, especially in Glimmer Bay, is realistic enough that one could see a future David Attenborough devoting a series to it. Everything hangs together from weather to geology to biology so that we take the implausible (the live crater on a dead planet) as plausible.

Its hero is not particularly likeable, self-centred (except in relation to Dalusa and perhaps only ambiguously not so) and slippery but believable. Sterling cleverly gives us clues to the psychology of an inter-planetary humanity that is not much different from ours.

Ellison's introduction is also worth reading (for all the ridiculous hyperbole at the beginning) if only to give us an idea of the environment in which the novel was created, an interesting shift from the world of pulp fiction for money to university-based 'literature'.

Yes, this is literary science fiction and no worse for that, born of a fertile and self-critical community of Texan science fiction writers. Science fiction that tries to be literature can collapse under its own portentous weight but Sterling manages to avoid that trap here.

In short, it is highly recommended whether you care about the graduate references or not. It stands on its own as a tale of the planetary weird and of a half-hearted and unstable redemption in a universe that remains as tough as it was on the planet, Earth, that seems to dominate that universe.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

The simplest way to describe Involution Ocean is Moby Dick meets Dune. A sybaritic drug user signs up with a whaling ship that sails on an ocean of dust to obtain a sure supply of the exotic drug Flare. No book could match up to greatness of those two, but Involution Ocean moves quickly, and sketches out a fascinating and mysterious world in the Great Dust Sea.

****

Reread 2021: Involution Ocean wears its homages on its sleeve, so much so that I wonder how much is below the surface. The style is great. While this is Sterling's first novel, and he hews closely to Melville's nautical anachronism, the bones of the patented cyberpunk eyeball kick style are still there. The protagonist John Newhouse's addiction and masochistic love for the bat-wing alien lookout Dalusa give the book an emotional urgency that leaps over otherwise simple characterization. And the alien ecology of the dust sea, with it whales and sharks and cannibal anemones delights in its opacity weirdness. The conclusion, a heretical voyage in a submarine made from a whale carcass and John's revelation of what lies under the sea, feels unearned and disconnected from the rest of the novel, but the journey is short, swift, and very interesting.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book that could have used a better editor. Sterling is brilliant at alien ecology, but occasionally schlocky at other things. He'll ellide key action sequences or spend pages setting up characters who disappear for the rest of the book. And his science has some holes, or at least fuzzy areas, particularly in the sudden, expository ending.

However, he's created a gorgeous world: an ocean of dust swimming with fantastical creatures and surrounded by 70-mile-high cliffs. Particularly stunning is the grim bay that gets only an hour of sunlight a day and is full of groping, light-starved things. (Think "Poor Unfortunate Souls"). And who can resist a sea voyage with a mad captain? Or a doomed romance with a sexy bat lady?

After this and Railsea, I'm becoming a devotee of Moby Dick SF. What else is there? Recommendations welcome!

[Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very fun and imaginative book that I enjoyed thoroughly. Cool concepts, interesting characters, and a great story overall. Knowing the story of Moby Dick, I had a good idea of how it would end, but this book still gripped my attention page after page. Elements of it reminded me a lot of Treasure Planet, and The Life Aquatic. Would definitely recommend to lovers of sci-fi looking for something a little different.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 5 out of 5]

So strange yet somehow Sterling delivers a poignant and moving story about a drug addict on an alien world who falls in love with a batlike alien. A sailor on a sea of dust. An alien world built in incredible detail. And I guess part of it is just realizing I’m a fan of this novelist’s work. That’s two novels and 10 stars; a pretty impressive start.

[Kat Hooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will review at www.fantasyliterature.com.

[Anca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for the first time as a teenager, and really enjoyed it. The protagonist isn't entirely likable, but he's plucky and inventive, and the setting is just amazing.

The world of Nullaqua has a single habitable zone - a 70-mile deep crater that is filled with an ocean made of dust. The human society on Nullaqua is a conservative and religious, kind of like Menonites. Sailors sail the dust ocean, capturing and killing dust whales, whose flesh sustains the economy and whose guts can be distilled into a powerful drug.

Unfortunately, the drug has been made illegal, so our addict protagonist takes a job on a whaling ship so as to get as close as possible to the actual source. The captain of the ship is a bit unhinged, and is trying to find out some of the planet's deepest secrets. He's got a great name: Desperandum! Definitely not someone with a sunny future ahead.

The plot is interesting and the pacing seems just right for the first 2/3 of the book. After that, it seems like Sterling wrote himself into a corner (a crater!) and the last part of the book feels rushed. The final mystery is resolved in a way that doesn't really make any sense.

Read this if you like world-building (and AFTER you read Sterling's second novel, the Artificial Kid) and really cool aliens, but be gentle with your expectations.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I should make it a new goal of mine to read every science fictional take on Melville's iconic *Moby Dick*, a specific class of novel which Bruce Sterling's debut novel, *Involution Ocean*, almost certainly rises to the top of. This 1977 Harlan Ellison-endorsed piece of adventure fiction is not only a nice twist on that classic work but also a harsh precursor to the cyberpunk movement (which Sterling himself is credited with helping develop) featuring Nullaqua, one of the better planets you'll read about all year. It's fresh and exciting and even though it doesn't quite nail the ending, I think it's one of the best things I've read this year.

*Involution Ocean* is about John Newhouse, a syncophine addict who lives in a house full of other syncophine addicts on Nullaqua, the planet with the dust whales that the drug is distilled from, shortly after the interstellar Confederation outlaws the making/trade of syncophine. This news comes to the house with their usual syncophine supplier, whom another addict tagged along with who joins the housemates in their rather forlorn daily dose before they come up with a great idea: "Let's get hired onto a whaling ship so we can distill some of the drug directly." An even better idea? "Let's make John Newhouse go without giving him a say in it." Newhouse doesn't like this approach but doesn't put up much of a fight, so he soon finds himself trying to get on the crew of various whaling ships in scenes about lays where I first realized that this book was *Moby Dick* on steroids. The random man is along with him, and both of them find room for them on the *Lunglance*, captained by one Captain Desperandum, one of the only captains not descended from the bush-nosed progeny of the originally genetically-altered Nullaquan population. Newhouse lands a position as a cook while his friend - erm, acquittance, Calothrick - clips into the role of your average deckhand. They quickly take to felling whales, but there are plenty of other character threads that we start learning about, such as Desperandum's obsession with science and expanding the body of knowledge, even at cost to himself, and that of Dalusa, a bat-like alien woman who's had her body surgically altered to look like that of a sexually attractive human woman because she felt alienated from her own kind, the very kind which ripped apart the first batch of human explorers who tried making contact only to realize that their biochemistry was destroyed by humans'. That affliction still haunts Dalusa - who functions as the ship's lookout - and when her and John Newhouse kiss for the first time, it ruins her faces for a surprising amount of days - maybe even weeks.

It's shortly after this (so her face is still ruined) when the *Lunglance* stops at the city of Arnar to recuperate and fix the ship up after they're all put through a horrible windstorm that nearly kills everyone. This is sometime after John distilled their first syncophine and Calothrick put it in native crewman Murphig's food to see if it worked - it didn't on Murphig, but it does end up working on them. They try having fun on shore leave, but John comes back to the ship early to see Dalusa, which Captain Desperandum warns is a bad idea - she has a fetish for human blood. And not that much later in the book, Desperandum has his own bad idea about wanting to get closer to the tentacled anemones in the name of science, right after a flock of razor-finned flying fish scorned the deck and cut him all up. The ships gets attacked by a bunch of little insects and then a giant anemone which Desperandum has Dalusa dump his blood on (the whalers coat their harpoons in their own blood, actually, because it's poison to native wildlife) to scare it off. He wants to learn more about science, though, and thinks he can rope Murphig into a momentous expedition. Before he can, though, Murphis and Calothrick kill each other while fighting about syncophine on deck, which the Captain discovers soon after John does, and follows up on it by taking John under his wing and making him go underneath the sea of dust in a hollowed-out whale carcass (a submarine!) despite Dalusa's protests. John - who's "bethroned" her - insists that going into dangerous situations is just something that humans do. Dalusa's proud, and wants to make him proud, so she tries to make him proud (after his and Desperandum's expedition gets wrecked by something down below and John has all kinds of visions of the Old One-like gods some natives believe in by going in after Desperandum too), which gets her killed. John's distraught, and when he returns home with the syncophine, he finds his old housemates seemed to have all killed each other - or themselves. He leaves the drugs behind and leaves Nullaqua in hope of becoming a better, different man.

*Involution Ocean* is impressive on four main levels; the first of those is the world that Sterling has crafted, which is based in Nullaqua's only habitable area: a 70-mile deep, 500-mile wide crater where an atmosphere of dust roils within. A unique ecosystem has evolved here, and humans have coloinzed the rocky spires above. You get the impression that Nullaqua is just one of many worlds in this future - it's been colonized for over four hundred years, and John Newhouse is from a lumber planet called Bunyan even though he tells women he's from Earth to be more lluring - but Sterling doesn't go into too much detail about the future-state as a whole. That kind of oversight usually bothers me, but I didn't mind because everything about this book - in how it was written and brainstormed - seemed full. There were asides about history and biology when there needed to be, but they never lasted too long, even though they always found connective tissue elsewhere in the story to link too. Nothing seemed off-hand or meaningless, but yet it also never felt too small and thin. It was a near-perfect blend of different worldbuilding scopes and techniques that made this noticeably superior to similarly-lengthened space opera works from the time like Brian M. Stableford's Hooded Swan series. This is in part because of the second really impressive thing: Sterling's prose. It's tight and accents things really well, occasionally turning to head-turning bouts of phrase and sometimes just rolling from point to point smoothly. Sure, there were some things about this book that weren't too smooth, but we'll get to those later, since Sterling's prose wasn't one of them. It's pretty impressive that this all came from a voice who had never published a novel before. The narrative is in first-person, and honestly, it had a timbre that reminded me of some of my favorite 80s' science fiction, like that of Walter Jon Williams.

Another Williams-esque element were the characters, who were fundamentally dark and screwed up in ways much more compelling than your average deranged character both inside and outside of genre fiction. For example, Calothrick is a hopeless drug addict, and Desperandum is self-destructively passionate about science. And don't even get me started on Dalusa... these characters are just hard to care about in all of the right ways. There's a certain brutality in self-destructiveness in books like Greg Egan's *Permutation City* which I find beautiful, which is why I found Dalusa's death when trying to make John proud of her kind of heart-wrenching. These are sad stories, but at least some of them end with a hopeful lisp. That being said, I do have some issues with the characters, specifically at the beginning. I don't mind how Sterling introduced all John's housemates and then promptly forget about them, but I do mind how Calothrick casually joined John with no background whatsoever and John kind of... completely ignored the weirdness of the situation. Like, he's not dumb, but some of the things he and others do towards the beginning make him look pretty oblivious. Unrealistically so. There were a couple other quibbles I had with how characters acted, but that's the main one.

An even bigger quibble for me was the ending. Basically, even though the whole "Old Ones" living under the dust had been foreshadowed, I didn't think that the dream-like "bends" sequence where John dreamed of cities of olde being destroyed was very impactful. Like, there's enough grit to sink one's teeth into (like Sterling does very fittingly at the last chapter) that this faux-psychedelic sequence seems unnecessary and unthematic. It was jarring, and what stole this book's 9/10 rating away from it. Another issue with the ending is that the things it was concerned with exploring had been there for human exploration for over four-hundred years and there shouldn't have been so much mystery about it. It just didn't seem logical, and while I'm sure you could write an explanation for why it isn't all known, Sterling never seemed to have put that thought in there. This makes part of Desperandum's entire plot arc kind of hollow and illogical.

Still, regardless, Desperandum is still a really good Ahab, and the best part is that *Involution Ocean*'s updates to *Moby Dick*'s themes of obsession don't end there; various other characters (although namely Calothrick and Dalusa) have their own arcs to deal with their obsessions which end powerfully. It's the persistence of the themes about obsessions which convinced me that this book was a refresh of Melville's classic. I'd come into it expecting a *Dune* pastiche because that's what the Outlaw Bookseller, one of the PrintSF YouTubers I regularly watch, advertised it as, but... I really don't see the comparisons. *Dune* is this omnipresent tale about prophecy and sociology where *Involution Ocean* really only shares an excess of sand and an overreliance on a drug produced from a big alien animal with it. I'm totally okay with that, though, because this take on classical literature which borders up upon the cyberpunk revolution was probably more impactful to me than a heaping space opera rehash would be. This book is still deep and interesting, but in different ways, and if you're into science fiction at all, I recommend this book to you.

That being said, with all that high praise, when you add the unfitting ending atop of slight logical inconsistencies is gets a "mere" 8.5/10, albeit a very high one. It's also made my "collection of *Moby Dick* SF Stories" along with Farmer's *The Wind Whales of Ishmael*, so it's definitely a welcome addition to the old bookshelves. It is a bit flawed - it is a debut novel, after all - but if Sterling could do this at 21, I really need to read some of his later stuff. He has the potential to have what I'd consider an incredible career, and what better praise is there than that? I don't think there are many places I could go from there except reading Greg Egan's *Distress*, so... I'm going to go do that! Thanks for reading this chunky love letter to a forgotten 70s SF novel, and here's hoping I see you around the ol' Goodreads, even if you are a different person than whomever first read this review...

[Vít · Rating 3 out of 5]

Docela pěkná space opera, která mi celou dobu hodně připomínala Melvillovu Bílou velrybu. Kapitán Desperandum má k Achabovi hodně blízko a není rozhodně sám. Takže když jsem zjistil, že se tahle knížka měla původně jmenovat "Moby Dust", nebyl jsem nijak překvapený.
Je ale poznat, že to je Sterlingova prvotina, nečekejte žádné zázraky. Jak to tak u prvotin bývá - nápady dobré, ale provedení trošku skřípe.

[Joel J. Molder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dune meets Moby Dick in Bruce Sterling’s first ever novel. Known mostly for his contributions to cyberpunk, Sterling’s short book is a fresh, portent vision of a world of drugs, bat-girls, and waterless ocean sailing.

Most of the plot follows the main character, a drug addict addicted to “Flare”, a hallucinogenic derived from a whale from the planet Nullaqua. when the government makes Flare illegal, John and a fellow addict join the crew of a whaling ship so he can make his own drug in secret. There, he meets an alien bat-like girl who’s had surgery to look human.

As the plot progresses, he falls in love with the bat-girl, but finds out she is highly allergic to human touch. The book follows his covert drug stilling and interactions with the eccentric captain, whose obsession revolves around the ecology of Nullaqua and the hidden life underneath the dry ocean.

Full of deep worldbuilding and character development, Involution Ocean showcases solid, unique themes about the environment, drugs/escapism, and using pain as a coping mechanism.

While I wouldn’t say the novel is perfect, it has solid storytelling and moves along in a straight clip. I’d give it a 3.5, rounded up to 4 stars, because I did enjoy myself and I felt the bleak yet oddly hopeful ending was a solid choice by Sterling.

[Warwick Stubbs · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5/5
I mean, I didn't hate it. But it wasn't objectively "good", just ok.

I was recommended this through a YouTube video "If you're bored with Dune, try this..." (or something like that), but while, in my opinion, Involution Ocean has better writing than Dune, the latter has far more depth and intellectual thought put into it. Sterling starts the story by introducing a bunch of friends with a paragraph of description each, and then they quickly get ejected from the rest of the story not to be heard of again. In between is a boring trip on a catamaran (or trimaran? - either way, not enough description to stop me from thinking of it as an ordinary single-hull sailing ship) on a "sea of dust". I read some criticisms of the science, but honestly, there's a lot of good ideas thrown in - but that's part of the problem: the ideas are thrown in, not worked out and thought through with any real conviction, and certainly not enough to give those ideas consequence that resonate throughout the rest of the story. By halfway, I was getting bored with the writing, the story, and characters not actually evolving or being of any interest, that by the time a character reveal arrived I just thought 'so?' - I just didn't care. I didn't care for the episodic nature of the storytelling, I didn't care for the characters, I didn't care for the question of intelligent life at the bottom of the ocean, and I didn't care about the ending sequences.

The whole book, all 174 pages of it, felt like it was thrown together. I can only hope Sterling made a massive turnaround when he pursued the cyberpunk genre. I wouldn't even recommend this to fans of Sterling. Not recommended for anything other than to pass on, and be forgotten.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book starts with one of the most preposterous premises I have ever encountered in a genre full of hard to swallow propositions. The cartoon show "Futurama" had an episode where the attendees at a lunar amusement park were entertained by animatronic robots singing a song called "whalers on the moon," meaning that the moon once featured such a thing. "Involution Ocean" features such a thing: whalers on a planet in the far future who sail seas of dust in search of whale-like critters for food and water. Amazingly, Sterling pulls it off: this is a fun book. My intelligence came through without insult or injury.

[Turtleman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hooked by the opening lines of Involution Ocean: "We all have some emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that some fill with art, some with God, some with learning. I have always filled the emptiness with drugs."

Involution Ocean was Bruce Sterling's first novel. Sterling is best known for being a major writer in cyberpunk science fiction, but this novel pre-dates cyberpunk. This wonderfully weird novel is about whaling, aliens, and, of course, drugs. I'm not sure everything makes sense but it is a fascinating read.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was longer than 172 pages came in like around 198 pages. There was an introduction by Harlan Ellison. He explained why he chose the story for his fourth discovery book, it was very humorous as well. The book itself is not a Moby Dick story. It reminds of a book that was written at the golden age of science fiction. However it was covering more darker material then Heinlein or Asimov ever went over. Drugs. drug addiction, sexual tension between two different races (never explored) I'd tell you why but too much of a spoiler alert. The book was fast paced and never boring. I understand his later novels are more Hard S/F. This seems fine but unfortunately some of those fans read his first book and complain it's not "Hard S/F." Get this book, I think you will enjoy it immensely, that is if you like just a well-told adventure story.

[Otherwyrld · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow

[The Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Deep down, deep down, we all wanted to die”. Choose life. If possible without having to hit the rock bottom of a gigantic sea of alien dust. This novel is a heady mix of eccentricities but with respect to Mr J. Cameron Nullaqua is the most unusual, transporting alien environment I visited in 2022 and better still it was even the venue for an actual narrative.

Sterling’s first novel – he was a mere stripling of a youth, 21, when he wrote it so hats off to him for that – is a moody piece with a noble message as long as you don’t start unpacking any of the details. Chapter one features detailed descriptions of a group of co-habiting syncophine addicts we then immediately abandon. Our protagonist is called John Newhouse and he lives with these rum folk in a building called “New House” from which he has taken his name. Either Sterling is already on manoeuvres or this is needlessly confusing. We then have a four hundred year old Captain rather self-consciously called “Nil Desperandum”, a deadly sea of dust (“dust to dust”) with its own weird ecology, a metal whaling ship with a protective deck of plastic, a drug addicted protagonist who displays a noticeable lack of affect for his ship mates while falling in lightly sado-masochistic love (“It was my first insight into the joy of pain”) with a bat-woman, the requisite Elder race, nods towards Moby Dick and much else. Masks preventing speech are worn irregularly on the deck of the whaler and there is a mixture of obliviousness to science (“How odd, I thought. Why did Desperandum bother with a dead end like science?”) alongside talk of television, memory banks, electrostatic fields and space travel. It’s not, to be polite, a particularly coherent world but the prose is above average and Newhouse has a nice line in acidic asides which dispel any pretension or pomposity. As a first novel it is absolutely a calling card for the author and metallic whaling-ship aside I was put in mind of “The Beach”, another debut featuring a prickly protagonist who gets more than he bargained for when tangling with nature.

In its foregrounded search for purpose and posturing emo noodlings (“After some thought I settled on a large broken heart as my own motif”) you can detect the twenty-something behind the wheel but then Sterling comes out with “A strange world, I thought, where a man could lean over the rail and spit emeralds” and the nascent writer is revealed. Sterling seems to pass “Ocean” off as juvenilia these days and there are certainly first novel problems here but its tale of a lost soul who goes to sea, finds love, nearly dies and returns home chastened but more purposeful remains affecting and there aren’t many novels out there featuring two men piloting a submarine constructed out of a whale carcass. “I wondered if I should get a nose-wig.”

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have ben struggling to decide how to review this one - In terms of enjoyment it was a five star read, I was quite delighted with it, read it straight through and plan to re-read before too long.

However, in technical terms, I don't think this is the best writing ever (which one would not expect, I believe it is his first novel) and despite the vibrancy of the narrative, the fun character and the fascinating world building it did have a few hiccups.

The protagonist self describes as a addict who is living in a druggie share house on this planet because of the availability of 'whale guts' which provide the drug to which everyone in the house is addicted.

When a law is passed on the world making it illegal to sell the product anymore the protagonist reluctantly ships out on a 'whaling ship' as a cook in order to procure the drug himself. Think, lashings of Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues under the sea...
EXCEPT,,,,
For the world building! This planet has no water and atmosphere only within a huge crater at the bottom of which is the 'ocean' which actually consists of dust.

This gives Sterling a basis for creating a fascinating (and wholly impossible; seriously, leave your credulity and you science at the front cover) Oceanic ecology complete with whales and spider crabs and diatoms and algae. I loved, LOVED the dust-ocean. I don't in the least bit care that it is not possible to science as we know it, it was immense fun to read.

From the masks the 'sailors' have to wear to protect themselves from the dust to the weird aliens, I did not mention the flighted female lookout, an alien as bizarre as she is dysfunctional. Oh, look, it is SUCH fun, just go read it, come back and we will talk!

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Debut novel from Bruce Sterling. No trace of the cyberpunk giant he was soon to become here, instead a straight up adventure tale on an airless planet - except for a 70 mile deep crater where the air remained from its outgassing. The ocean of dust formed within is the habitable portion known as Nullaqua, which can be sailed on by ships much like a liquid ocean. When drifter and drug addict/procurer John Newhouse hears that the euphoric drug Flare is to be outlawed he decides rather rashly to make one last big score before the prohibition. Unfortunately this means going to the source - giant dustwhales that inhabit the dust ocean. A dangerous undertaking not helped by him becoming besotted with an altered humaniform, the batlike Dalusa, and the mad captain Nils Desperandum, who is obsessed with the giant creatures under the surface. Plenty of interest in this book, and despite Harlan Ellison’s protestations to the contrary in the foreword, it does evoke scenes from Moby Dick. Worth a look.

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1977 when Sterling was only 21, Involution Ocean is a bold, exuberant work that is fast-paced, action-packed, and richly imagined. Sterling does not simply retell Moby Dick in outer space. Rather, he uses Melville's novel as inspiration for an unusual adventure story about a drug-addicted cook's search for dustwales at the bottom of a huge crater on the desert planet Nullaqua. It's a short book with plenty of action. As a bonus, it includes a kinky interspecies romance with a bat-like alien. Sterling went onto greater triumphs (Schismatrix Plus and his Shaper/Mechanist stories), but this book gave the world notice of a wonderfully talented writer.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

“Turn and look behind you, reader. Can you see the crater now? It is wide, round, magnificent; within it shimmers a sea of air above a sea of dust. Almost a million human beings live within this titanic hole, this incredible crater, this single staring eye in the face of an empty planet” (119).

In my youth naval history and fiction transfixed: from the capture of the Spanish Xebec El Gamo by Lord Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald to C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower sequence, inspired in part by Lord Cochrane’s career. I assessed [...]"

[Dávid Novotný · Rating 3 out of 5]

It had some interesting ideas, people living inside giant crater filled with dust, strange fauna and some glimpses of mysterious history. But it's visible that this is author's first novel. There is very little character development, almost none world building and some actions and decision of characters lack logic. (Or at least are missing some background for it.) So mostly it's book about whale hunters, two junkies and sailing from one place to another. All mystery, that had pretty good potential, is squeezed to few pages at the end. All in psychedelic dream that bring more questions than explanations.

[Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. A drug addict agrees to go on a voyage to illicitly obtain more drugs after they become illegal. The catch is the drug is found only in the innards of a strange alien whale that exists in a ocean of dust and that in order to get to them he has to voyage on a boat crewed by aliens and led by a mad questionably motivated captain. What could possibly go wrong?

If you liked The Scar by Mieville or the Face of the Waters by Silverberg this will definitely fit your groove.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Sci-Fi cover of Moby Dick, this novel was a blast. Sterling's firm knowledge of the source material that didn't ruffle any of my feathers. The language echoed Melville, though there wasn't much allegory to speak of. The story also blazed its own path sufficiently to be interesting on its own. It was almost felt like Moby Dick meets Alien at times. It was a great summer read.

[John Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once upon a time, Moby Dick met Dune and Philip K. Dick in a gritty little boiler room with a sack full of pills and a weekend to kill and the result was this novel, channeled by the magnificent Bruce Sterling. I first read this at 16 in high school over the course of a week and have held on to my beat up little paperback of it since then.

[Dan Roebuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, fun novel evoking 'Moby Dick' and '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' and a really impressive debut by Bruce Sterling, from whom I've only read the excellent steampunk classic 'The Difference Engine', which he collaborated with William Gibson on. Memorable characters, humorous dialogue and imaginative aliens - great fun.

[Andy F · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting world building, potential for a great story is there but just never happens. Some nice ideas but they lead nowhere. The ending is extremely messy and clearly rushed. Disappointed as it could have been so much better.

[Brown Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a fun little novel, in the spirit of Farmer or Barrett, succinct and punchy. It isn't a light read, but it doesn't overtax your patience or overreach in its ambitions: a solid, respectable first novel.

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very silly book. Moby Dick by way of Dune, with none of the weight of either. Hilariously, the cover of this specific edition gets every single detail wrong, from the ocean to the landscape to the whale to the boat.

[Miro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be made into a sci-fi movie.

[Aaron Byers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moby Dick in space with dust instead of water and drugs instead of whale oil. Weirdness throughout but the story didn't really engage as well as other, weird-like stories like Spatter-jay.