Book Review: The Sigsbee Deep

Title: The Sigsbee Deep

Author: Richard J. Miller

Date: 2021

Publisher: my copy is self-published

ISBN: my copy shows none

Length: 162 e-pages

Quote: “The Sigsbee Deep is over fourteen thousand feet, straight down. First, there is the corona, an area of two to three thousand feet, then the falloff into the Deep itself—it might as well be bottomless.”

That’s what the characters in this novel are facing in a hypothetical 2052 where Al Gore’s dystopian fantasies from the 1990s are finally starting to become real.

It’s science fiction, of course. Hard science, which is why so many people in an online book review network felt unqualified to review this book. At least I’ve read enough science to tell you that I’m not really qualified to review this book.

The geology is admittedly weak, postulating a new seismic fault that produces a series of earthquakes in Florida. In the hypothetical 2040s most of the coastal cities are wiped off the map, though low-lying cities near the coast, including Washington and St. Petersburg, Florida, are still above water. Early in the novel a big earthquake separates St. Petersburg from Tampa, then Pinellas Park from St. Petersburg.

(Pinellas Park is the suburb of St. Pete where the relatives I call “Aunt Dotty and Uncle Pete” lived, and is the part of Florida of which I have clear, detailed memories. In hypothetical 2052 some buildings have apparently survived but, improbably, the little tract houses of which the suburb-town mostly consists have been re-greened back into farms where people can raise enough crops to live on. Presumably the destruction of towns on the other side of Florida has kept people from pouring into increasingly shabby tract houses as the retirees have grown old and died. On a map of the Gulf Coast Pinellas Park can be described as sitting on a tiny “Pinellas Peninsula,” a little crook of land at the south end of the Tampa Bay; if separated from the main peninsula that is Florida, this mini-peninsula would become the sort of tiny island that could easily slide all the way down into the ocean, as, in this novel, it’s doing.)

The biology is unadmittedly even weaker: In an improbably re-greened suburb-town in central Florida, “global climate change” is as real as the local warming effect feels to people who live there, sea levels have risen, that’s what’s altering the shape of the ocean floor, but people are raising corn and unable to get coffee. If Florida had warmed up that much, coffee would probably grow better than corn...and the people struggling to get off their island before it sinks would be more malnourished for that reason.(The giant fish on the cover is an exaggeration of the concept; according to the text the mutant fish called Krake gape only three feet wide, but they’re big enough to eat humans and attack boats, like sharks, in hope of dislodging humans.)

The psychology is hopeless: The protagonists are multiracial, their antagonist is a White racist straight out of 1952, the protagonists have never done any shooting, the antagonist (true to stereotype) shoots constantly, yet when things reach that point the old Hollywood cliché kicks in and zaps the baddie’s well-practiced marksmanship. Good luck to anyone seriously counting on that effect to win any sort of fight or contest. David killed Goliath, but not the second or third time he’d ever taken a good look at a slingshot.

But good science fiction can use ideas more scientifically unsound than those, if it’s well written fiction (which The Sigsbee Deep is, reasonably) and if the science on which the story is based is not geology, biology, or psychology. Often stories like that focus on astrophysics—“space operas,” if they’re bad fiction; The Sigsbee Deep ventures into more debatable territory by focussing on mechanical science. Mays Jackson’s ability to reunite himself and his children with their mother depends on his ability to salvage junk from a conveniently located motor vehicle graveyard and build a working solar-powered submarine.

So it’s real, hard-core, Jules Verne type science fiction. What makes Jules Verne great is not that his prose style is extraordinary; it’s clear and readable, in English translation or in the original French, but nobody raves over his ability to turn a phrase. It’s not that his characterizations are full of brilliant insights; his characters range from stereotypes to stick figures. It’s that his speculative engineering read well enough to interest real engineers in building the gadgets about which Verne fantasized, and, with some tweaking and fine-tuning, several of them work.

The Sigsbee Deep begs to be read by real engineers and tested, so that, if people do really need to evacuate any island fast, for any reason, they could have the option of building solar-powered submarines. With or without spikes to kill attacking sharks.

Meanwhile, since family problems aren’t the topic of the story, we get a lovely, Little House on the Prairie-like picture of a faithful husband and two hardworking, uncomplaining, tantrum-free teenagers. And, as a special treat for baby-boomers, the third and fourth generations after us are able to bond by laughing at, but dancing along with, an improbably preserved recording of Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up.”

Like many good science fiction stories this one’s plot boils down to a male fantasy of singlehandedly saving at least the part of the planet the hero cares about from super-dangers, and, if the science is sound, nobody minds. So I can’t judge this novel. All I can say is that I’d like to find out about the science in this fiction.