Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham ~ 1953. This North American edition: Ballantine, 1969. Originally published in Great Britain as The Kraken Wakes. Paperback. 182 pages.
Fellow British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss once sneered at John Wyndam for the lack of desperate drama in his plots – I believe “cozy catastrophes” was the term he used. And I have to say I get what he was saying, and that the snub has some basis.
Wyndham’s “What if?” sci-fi concoctions are disaster novels with the same relation to real life as, say, Agatha Christie’s decorous murder mysteries. Everybody is very, very civilized about everything, even when in situations of utter horror, and while in the throes of deepest emotion.
Restful, in a way, reading these. Subject matter having nothing to do with the overlying tone. Everything’s under control here, move along there, don’t panic.
At the start of this story, 1950-something, post-war England is getting back to its new normal. Social order is as peaceful as it can be, rationing is a thing of a not-so-distant past, conditions in general are not too dreadful on the home front. The Cold War is looming, of course, Russia and the United States are busy trading insults and placing spies and building up their arsenals, but England has her head down and things are plugging along.
In Wyndham’s slightly modified Great Britain, a new radio and television broadcaster has established itself, the E.B.C. – English Broadcasting Corporation – in direct well-behaving competition with the fusty B.B.C. – and Mike and Phyllis Watson, newly married – are both employed there as journalists and story researcher-writers.
They’ve had some interesting experiences working for the E.B.C., the most recent being their witnessing – along with a whole shipful of other people – the strange phenomenon of large red “fireballs” raining down from the sky and landing in the ocean.
Reports of these are coming in from all around the globe, and the odd fighter plane gets a shot off, but no one can identify what these objects are. Scientists get going and do their stuff. A deep-diving “bathyscope” (based on the real-life undersea-exploring Bathysphere manned by William Beebe in the 1920s and 30s) is sent down to the site where some of the fireballs were seen to enter the ocean. Transmission is cut off suddenly – the cable is pulled up melted off (!) – the bathyscope and its two crew members have vanished! (Mike and Phyllis are there for the whole thing.)
And then the fireballs stop coming. And things go quiet for a year or so.
Cue foreboding music…
One day people – and yes, by “people” I mean Mike and Phyllis, and a few percipient others – start noticing an unusual pattern in ships going down with very little notice in various parts of the world’s oceans. And always above the deepest marine trenches, in places where those fireballs were seen splashing down. Trans-oceanic cable-laying ships, fishing boats, a Japanese passenger liner, the Queen Anne, pride of Great Britain’s transatlantic fleet!…and a warship…an American luxury liner… What is going on!?!
Could it be The Russians?
Or something more sinister? Something from…drumroll…OUTER SPACE?
Cutting right through all the drama, I’ll be a big old plot spoiler and tell you that yes, yes it is.
Space Aliens.
Those fireballs were actually transport pods, from one of the gas giant planets, or so the theory goes, hence their attraction to the highest pressure bits of the world’s oceans. They’re absolutely not friendly. They spit back atomic bombs aimed in their general direction, they start sending up very icky “sea tanks” to harvest things (people!) living along the sea shores. But, when the humans figure out how to destroy these, things again go silent.
Another year or two passes. And then, one day someone notices…hey, isn’t that the sea level rising? And there are sure a lot of icebergs about. What is happening to the polar ice caps?!
Yup. The sub-marine aliens are melting the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, and things are about to get very rough for the land-dwellers of Earth.
But good old Mike and Phyllis rock right along taking everything in stride. Needless to say, they come through everything – a close call by sea tank attack, the inundation of much of Great Britain, the breakdown of civilization as they know it – with flying colours, thanks to their level-headed pre-planning-for-disaster and a few handy connections among the scientist community who slip them the occasional bit of insider info.
I won’t divulge the ending, but it’s looking sort of like humankind might survive after all, thanks to the work of Japanese scientists: “A very ingenious people, the Japs; and in their more sociable moments, a credit to science.”
Uh huh.
Sheer period piece science fiction, and despite my frivolous tone above, it’s actually pretty darned good for its time and genre. Wyndham can write, and though he slides over the trickier bits – no sense slowing down the story with pesky details – he spins a (sometimes) genuinely chilling tale.
Final score: 7/10 for Mike and Phyllis, and the plucky band of true-blue Brits who’ve kept the radio channels running all this time. Not to mention those science-minded “Japs”.
Here’s a little bonus I must share. The original British title of this book is The Kraken Wakes, taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1830 poem. Enjoy!
The Kraken Wakes
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Leaves & Pages 
That polite ordered world that Brian Aldiss objected to, is the only kind of sci-fi world I am likely to read. But then I love Agatha Christie’s world of murder too. I read The Midwich Cuckoos a couple of years ago and loved it. I have been meaning to read more Wyndham. This sounds entertaining.
That is my current science fiction preference, too, though I read much more “extreme” sci-fi writers when I was a teenager. Much as I like to poke gentle fun at John Wyndham, I do greatly enjoy his books. They are all exceedingly readable. The short stories are very good as well, and worth seeking out.
I think that one inspiration for British “cosy catastrophes” may have been memories of WWII. For many people it was a cosy catastrophe – guaranteed work, enforced equality, healthy food supplied and not many dead.
I dunno – I’ll maybe give you the guaranteed work and enforced equality argument, do you think it was truly “cozy” to be the target of so many bombs, and to endure what the civilian population did – there was genuine widespread hardship for years and years, and a significant number of casualties, not to mention the property destruction. I wonder if the “cozy catastrophe” genre was the antidote to that, versus a nostalgic reminder of something similar. Any UK readers want to weigh in on this? 🙂
I will have to agree w Leaves on this wrt WWII not being cosy. My mum was scarred by it when she was evacuated and didn’t see her parents for more than a year, and I think that this was a common reaction.
Yes, I think so. I have friends who were children during the war in England, and occasionally they talk about it and no, it wasn’t particularily cozy. Deeply traumatizing, in fact, though it wasn’t the thing to show much emotion over it. Everyone was in the same position, and people just plugged along doing the best they could. My father’s family is German – my father was a soldier in the war, conscripted when he was a teenager – and they also carry their share of war trauma, seldom referenced but very much there. Any war, any country – an emotionally wounding experience even if one escapes the physical dangers.
Interesting to read about a new-to-me Wyndham. Great review and thanks for the tip!
You’re most welcome! Should be an easy one to find – remember the two titles. Hope you enjoy it.
[…] ~ Out of the Deeps a.k.a. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham ~ 1953. Aliens from a gas giant planet infiltrate Earth’s ocean’s with […]
Very late with this, but The Kraken Wakes has an episode dealing with Mike’s nervous breakdown/PTSD after Escondida that was removed from Out of the Deeps, and a significantly less reassuring ending. Very definitely worth reading the UK original instead!