I owe many details of the helicopter crash scene to Glenn Norman and Glenn Morrison, both pilots, and both more helpful to pesky authors than I had any right to expect. I was astonished to learn that even when a helicopter loses all power in mid-flight, it’s still possible to walk away from the crash by practicing an emergency technique called “autorotation”. Glenn Morrison, in fact, survived a crash eerily parallel to the one described herein, except for the fact that he is not blind. (For the record, he doesn’t think there’s a hope in hell off pulling off that maneuver in real life if you are blind, and he knows his stuff. On the other hand, he doesn’t know Ken Lubin.)
Parts of other people’s life histories made their way into the story. Certain impressionistic details of the dog attack took their inspiration from wild canines encountered by one Rob Cunningham on his travels through India. (You may know Rob as the dude who created those gorgeous spaceship designs for Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the RTS computer games from Relic Entertainment.) Eight-year-old Achilles Desjardins’s experiments with aerobraking were lifted from the childhood confessions of Mark Showell, fisheries biologist, although Mark is not a sexual sadist so far as I know. (If anything he’s a masochist, judging by the guy he chose to do his Master’s under.)
Isaac Szpindel, MD, Ph.D., skilled in so many and varied endeavors that it makes me sick, helped me load Taka’s lines with plausible medical chrome. Dave “the bioinformatician” Block answered numerous impertinent questions about artificial nucleotides and minimum genotype sizes. (Unfortunately, one of the things he taught me was that you can’t cram a 1.1MB genotype into a cell 250nm across, which contradicts physical stats for ßehemoth already described in Maelstrom.) Major David Buck, of the New Zealand Defence Force, helped me out on the subject of Fuel Air Explosive ordnance. Steve Ballentine, Hannu Blommila, Rick Kleffel, Harry Pulley, Catriona Sparks, Bebe Schroer, Janine Stinson, Mac Tonnies, and David Williams have all pointed me to relevant research papers, reviews, opinions, and/or news articles that went into the ßehemoth mix one way or another. Jan Stinson also went through the manuscript with an editorial eagle-eye, catching typos and bigger problems which I hope the rest of you won’t notice. Not to mention others whom I’ve probably forgotten, and of whom I hereby pre-emptively beg forgiveness.
You can’t blame any of these good folks if this book sucks, since none of them were allowed to read it. (If it does suck, maybe that’s why.) You can’t even blame David Hartwell, who did read it, because the book would have sucked even harder without his input. You can only blame me, and you might as well since I’ve already got your money.
Well, fifty cents of it, anyway.
Notes and references
Once again it’s time to trot out a variety of citations that will hopefully serve as a valuable educational resource, even though they’re primarily intended to cover my ass against nitpickers.
If you have come late to this saga, you may not find the following references as complete as you’d like. Any real-world science elements introduced in Starfish and Maelstrom were cited at the end of those books; I don’t repeat those citations here, even though many elements persist into ßehemoth. (I do, however, cite related research that has come out since Maelstrom was released, especially if it makes me look especially prescient in some way.) So if you’re looking for my original sources on smart gels, “fine-tuning”, or the Maelstrom Ecosystems, you’ll have to go back and check the other books. You still may not find everything you’re looking for, but you might at least make my Amazon numbers look a little less dismal.
Atlantis: There Goes the Neighborhood
There is a place in the middle of the North Atlantic where the currents stop dead, an eye in the middle of that great slow gyre revolving between Europe and North America[1]. It seemed like a reasonable spot to hide from lethal particles potentially borne on wind and water, so I put Atlantis there. The surrounding topography took some inspiration from a 2003 report on abyssal mineralogy[2]. Impossible Lake was inspired by the ultrasaline lens of heavy water described in the ground-breaking documentary series “Blue Planet”[3]. The failure of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream is increasingly likely in view of increased melt water discharge from the Arctic (e.g., [4],[5]). And I know they don’t actually figure into the plot anywhere, but Lenie Clarke worries about them on her way to the surface in Chapter One so it’s fair game: giant squids now outmass the whole human race, and they’re getting even bigger[6]!
ßehemoth
We continue to discover life increasingly deep in the lithosphere. At last count, deep crustal rocks beneath the Juan de Fuca Ridge—yes, the very ridge from which ßehemoth escaped at the end of Starfish—have yielded evidence of heretofore unknown microbial lifeforms[7]. Water samples from boreholes 300 m below that seabed show depleted levels of sulphate: something down there is alive, unclassified, and consuming sulphur. There’s no evidence that it would destroy the world if it ever reached the surface, but then again there’s no evidence it wouldn’t, either. I can always hope.
That hope is a faint one, though. Patricia Rowan was right to argue that ßehemoth, by virtue of its ancient origins, should be an obligate anaerobe[8]. To even make it out onto the seabed would require either a very convenient mutation, or a deliberate tweak. Damn lucky the plot called for one anyway.
Waters et al. have recently reported the discovery of an ancient, hot-vent-dwelling nanobe called Nanoarchaeum equitans[9]; genome size, proportion of junk DNA, and diameter are all in the ßehemoth ballpark. Even better, it’s a parasite/symbiont (it lives on a much larger Archeon called Ignicoccus). However, its minimalist genome (about 500 kilobases, half the size of ßehemoth’s) lacks the recipes for certain vital enzymes, which it must therefore get from its host. It could never be a free-liver. ßehemoth, with its larger genome, is more self-sufficient—but how it crams all those extra genes into a capsule only 60% the size remains a mystery.
The fishheads and the corpses got into a bit of a debate about the odds of ßehemoth hitching a ride in the flesh of dispersing larval fish. I was always worried about that myself, even back when I was writing Starfish—if true, there’d be no reason why ßehemoth would not have, in fact, taken over the world billions of years ago. Invertebrate larvae do seem to cross vast distances in the deep sea; fortunately they generally go into a sort of arrested development en route1, making them unlikely carriers of ßehemoth (which needs an actively-metabolizing host to withstand long-term thermo-osmotic stress). It also appears that even highly-dispersing larval fish species maintain fairly distinct geographic ranges, judging by the lack of genetic flow between populations around adjacent islands[10],[11]. Worst comes to worst, local topographic and chemical conditions can constrain the distribution of various deep-water species[12],[13].
1
Van Dover, C.L.,
3
British Broadcasting Corporation. 2001. The blue planet: a natural history of the ocean, Part 3: The Deep.
4
Peterson, B.J.,
5
Weaver, A.J., and C. Hillaire-Marcel. 2004. Global warming and the next ice age.
6
Bildstein, T. 2002. Global warming is good (if you like calamari).
7
Cowen, J.P,
8
Kasting, J.F., and J.L. Siefert. 2002. Life and the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere.
9
Waters, E.,
10
Palumbi, S.R., and R.R. Warner. 2003. Why Gobies are like Hobbits.
11
Taylor, M.S., and M.E. Hellberg. 2003. Genetic Evidence for Local Retention of Pelagic Larvae in a Caribbean Reef Fish.
12
Vrijenhoek, R.C. 1997. Gene flow and genetic diversity in naturally fragmented metapopulations of deep-sea hydrothermal vent animals.