Deepwater Dreams

On the ocean world of Aurlanus, young people do not become adults by reaching an administratively convenient birthday, receiving a card and being told that life now consists largely of passwords and bills. They must face the kalinerre: an ancient rite in which those selected by lot leave the safety of their island and surrender themselves to the vast, unpredictable sea. Most return. The existence of that reassuring word “most” is naturally what gives the ceremony its character.

The inhabitants of Aurlanus are descended from human colonists genetically engineered long ago to survive in an aquatic environment. They can move through the sea with abilities their ancestors did not possess, but adaptation has not made the ocean tame. Beyond the familiar shallows lies deep water: beautiful, frightening and filled with mysteries that island society has preserved through ritual rather than explanation.

In Deepwater Dreams, the kalinerre is both an ordeal of survival and a passage into knowledge. The young participants must leave behind the rules and certainties of childhood, discover what they are capable of and confront aspects of their world that their elders have not been entirely eager to discuss. This is a recognisable coming-of-age experience, except that the familiar terrors of embarrassment, uncertainty and unwanted responsibility are accompanied by the possibility of disappearing beneath an alien sea.

Sydney J. Van Scyoc creates a society shaped by its environment, where human beings have been physically altered by technology but understand themselves through customs, legends and communal memory. The scientific origins of the people sit beneath their culture like something half-visible below the water. Their ancestors designed bodies suited to this planet; they were rather less successful at designing a future in which nobody would develop secrets, rivalries or alarming initiation ceremonies.

The novel blends science fiction with the atmosphere of myth. Its alien ocean is not merely scenery but a living presence: a source of food, identity, fear and transformation. Van Scyoc is interested in the way people adapt not only biologically but emotionally and socially to a world radically unlike Earth. Humanity has crossed interstellar space, redesigned itself and settled another planet, only to discover that adolescence remains technically insoluble.

Published by Avon Science Fiction in 1991, Deepwater Dreams is a thoughtful young-adult science-fiction novel concerned with identity, inherited tradition and the hazardous distance between what a society teaches its children and what those children eventually discover for themselves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy immersive planetary cultures, aquatic science fiction and coming-of-age stories in which “finding yourself” is a considerably more literal and dangerous undertaking than usual.

This copy is in Good condition. It has remained dry, intact and comfortably above sea level, with the reasonable signs of previous reading expected from a book that has travelled through more than three decades without the benefit of genetic adaptation.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where all rites of passage are optional and customers can attain full purchasing status without being abandoned in open water.

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