Starfish
by Peter Watts · first published 1999
64% recommend36% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Hard-science biopunk about people modified to work at deep-sea geothermal vents, with cascading disasters and a chilling trained-neural-network subplot. Suits Blindsight fans; the author's site hosts it free.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Civilization rests on the backs of its outcasts. So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometers below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have preadapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place.
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Peter Watts' (of Blindsight fame) novel Starfish revolves around geothermal harvesting of this rift as you describe. Fun read. https://www.amazon.com/Starfish-Rifters-Trilogy-Peter-Watts/...
on “Warm liquid from Oregon seafloor comes from Cascadia fault” ↗Ok. Go read Starfish by Peter Watts.
on “One Hundred Books in April from Hacker News” ↗Starfish by Peter Watts (and a couple sequels). I don't really remember how much creatures feature in the book though.
on “A deep-sea fisherman in Russia has been posting his finds on Twitter” ↗I recently re-read Starfish by Peter Watts and man that book rhymes a lot with current events.
on “Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word” ↗Peter Watts' science-fiction novel "Starfish" is a story of numerous, cascading distaters, one of which is a serious earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Short description and links to commercial vendors on Goodreads [0], and the complete…
on “In 1914, a 200ft wave at Trinidad, California (2014)” ↗And Peter Watts' Starfish, from the web site of the author https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm That's the next earthquake.
on “1700 Cascadia Earthquake” ↗You might like Peter Watts' Starfish.
on “A cave in Romania that was sealed for 5.5M years” ↗…baseball ones). There's also some high quality public domain science fiction from authors such as: Harry Harrison (only a few that he forgot to copyright) Cory Doctorow Peter Watts (Blindsight is awesome, Starfish is good too) And if you like any of these, Feedbooks always suggests related titles at the end of the book that you might also like. On Kindles, these are live links for one click downloads. Frankly,…
on “The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader is live” ↗Peter Watts, especially Blindsight, although Starfish is also good. He's the rare writer who combines hard and soft SF in one; keep plowing through the first thirds to halves of his novels, which are confusing but worth the payoff. I also read Kim Stanley…
on “My Summer Reading List” ↗…is right up there with Charles Stross for great intellectual hard Sci-fi. Both also have several books published under the creative commons license: http://www.feedbooks.com/author/193 (Peter Watts, Starfish was a great biopunk marine biology novel) http://www.feedbooks.com/book/228/accelerando (Accelerando, reccomended for anyone who likes Dyson Spheres, Post Human intelligence, Distributed Autonomous Organizations,…
on “Peter Watts's “Echopraxia”: Ferociously Intellectual Pulp Writing” ↗For anyone interested in this concept, without spoiling too much, you should read the sci-fi book Starfish by Peter Watts. He has the entire text of the book up for free on his website, in glorious 1990s handcrafted HTML: https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm
on “Sugar Substitutes Surprise” ↗Another recommendation for Peter Watts. Watts' Backlist is also available to read from his website, including 4 novels (his Starfish + Maelstrom + Behemoth trilogy) and Blindsight, as well as many short stories: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm If you read only one of Watts' books, read Blindsight.
on “Ask HN: Sci-Fi Book Recommendations” ↗Peter Watts novel Starfish, a stunning quarter century old now, has exactly that problem as part of its side plot. In a chilling detail relevant to today, it posits a black-box trainable neural network (biological in the book…
on “The three million toothbrush botnet story isn't true” ↗You can't mention the Juan de Fuca ridge without mentioning the claustrophobic 90s sci-fi psychological thriller "Starfish" by Peter Watts, which he graciously hosts in its full text for free on his delightfully Geocities-esque website: https://rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm
on “2K earthquakes in 1 day off Canada coast” ↗Watts is an excellent hard scifi author & a lot of his older writing -- including many short stories, the Rifters trilogy (Starfish/Maelstrom/Behemoth) and the excellent novel Blindsight are available to read here: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm Peter Watts has been interviewed on the science fiction podcast "tales from…
on “Some novelists are becoming video game writers and vice-versa” ↗