Recommend: Yes
There are a few science fiction authors that I feel are in a league of their own. Their concepts just exist on a completely different plane. When you find these books and devour them, the remnants float around in the back of your head for months afterwards. Ted Chiang, Cixin Liu, Kim Stanely Robinson (his earlier works) and most definitely Peter Watts. Starfish is no exception.
The setting of Starfish is, like his other books, simple and contained. Instead of a spaceship, you spend most of the book in an abyssal trench at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean with a crew of rifters. These modified people maintain a geothermal plant under kilometres of ocean amidst a unique ecosystem of deep-sea life. There is a broader world out there, but you only see snippets of it. It’s as much of a mystery to you as it is to the rifters at the bottom of the ocean.
Unlike Firefall, this book has the benefit of understandable and distinct characters with only one subspecies of human. This is a major benefit as it means you’re not constantly exerting yourself to try and remember the obscure quirks and decipher the communications of multiple fundamentally different entities at once. The rifters are all broken from their own unique trauma. All develop throughout the book as they lose themselves to the rift in similar, but distinct ways. There is a captivating element of a psychological thriller as people rotate throughout their rifter placements in the first part of the book. This helps make the start of the book much stronger and readable than Firefall and is an improvement in my perspective
Thankfully it also keeps what worked best with his other novels: the ideas. Peter Watts is obviously interested by the concepts of life and intelligence and where those boundaries lie. Firefall and Starfish both probe the depths of those questions in space and on Earth respectively.
The key complication here is the discovery of a completely different form of life at the bottom of the trench. This isn’t just some weird fish or anything so easily tangible as that. This is a 3.5 billion year old alternative to DNA that didn’t get the upper hand in the evolutionary war and had been trapped near a geothermal vent for a few billion years. The existential threat of this to not just humanity, but the biosphere, is starkly conveyed in the following dialogue. The threat from this βehemoth (the β is a Greek Beta) is only touched on in this book and establishes the remainder of the three book series up well.
“And just out of curiosity what would that limit be?”
“Two and a half billion.” He could barely hear her. “Firestorm the Pacific Rim.”
The use of “artificially intelligent” gels is the other prescient concept. The black box nature of their intelligence and its blind reliance on reinforced pattern matching is obviously paralleled in modern LLMs (NB: this book was written in 1999). The opaque nature of their intelligence and the blind reliance of humanity on them (what are they really matching together) seems terrifyingly close in our modern world.
Checkers or chess. An easy choice. It belonged to the same class of problem that Node 1211/BCC had been solving its whole life. Chess and checkers were simple strategic algorithms, but not equally simple.
…
It was all the same problem really. Twelve-eleven know exactly what side it was on.
There’s snippets of other gems that seem tantalising close to being realised in the modern world. While these could be the basis for an entire book that coasts on a single idea, here they are strictly world-building only. For example:
The Net was plagued with complex self-replicating information strings, just as alive as 1211, but in a completely different way
Organs wear out faster, urine turns to oil. It’s best just to keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long and they sort of corrode, implants or no implants.
But that’s another of Fischer’s problems. He never takes the long view.
This is why people love science fiction. It’s not because the setting is an escape from the mundane reality of life or the plot is full of whiz-bang gizmos. It’s because you read it and it makes you think about the world in a different way. All the best books, irrespective of genre, do this. Some make you appreciate a time, place or culture that you could never otherwise do. Some make you understand human emotions that you have never felt. Science fiction stretches what you assumed about reality. It can be mind expanding and Peter Watts is a potent dose indeed.
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