Blurbs: Starfish

Pro

Con

"...the dark universe of the sea bottom and rich characterization captivate to the last page.  Watts makes a brilliant debut with a novel that is part undersea adventure, part psychological thriller, and wholly original."

"A powerful first novel...A savage, bitter, and often blackly comic vision of the near future... Watts has rendered a character whose emotional complexity demands our respect.  ... [The ending] is both startling and oddly satisfying in its earned nihilism.  A terrific debut from an author we will be seeing again."

"No one has taken this premise to such pitiless lengths — and depths — as Watts ... In a claustrophobic setting enlivened by periodic flashes of beauty and terror, the crew of Beebe Station come across as not only believable but likeable as they fight for equilibrium against their own demons, one another, their superiors and their remorselessly hostile surroundings."

"A dark jewel of a book.  [Watts] undersea environment is sensual and realistically detailed.  His speculations about several aspects of cutting-edge science are worthy of Gregory Benford and Joan Slonczewski...[the] prose is muscular and poetic.  A somber and disturbing story."

"An excellent first novel...a stylishly-written and entirely successful melange of hard science and character- centered story...The sort of novel that in more innocent days people would have said is what good science fiction is centrally about.

"Fizzing with ideas, and glued together with dark psychological tension: an exciting debut."

"—poor organization, drifting points of view, an inconsistently-applied, tough-to-read present-tense narrative..."

"Watts' first novel elegantly captures the isolation and claustrophobia of the lightless ocean depths, smoothly blending psychological suspense with high-tech sf adventure."

"A tense tale of deep-sea exploration... A potent first novel."

"Watts has created a beautiful yet dangerous world for us to explore.  The story is compelling, rich with character and nuance, and delicately flavoured with a little danger.  For anyone tired of the usual space opera or elf-ridden fantasy tale, Starfish is a delightful breath of...seawater."

"Peter Watts delivers—solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind."

"Once in a while that rare gem comes along amidst the ranks of SF writers who can integrate science, story and character. Peter Watts is one such writer. Starfish is an example of science fiction at its best: great science, great story, and, ultimately, profound humanity."

"Watts' true enemy is human stupidity, the sort of thing that turns children into walking disaster zones, treats adults as interchangeable things, insists that unchecked fertility is a Good Thing, and blindly trusts that our artificially intelligent creations must share our priorities.  As Watts develops that point, he tells an absorbing tale set in a bizarre world and hinging upon intriguing technology.  He's done his homework well, and it shows."

"The book's single greatest flaw is surely its last few paragraphs, so madly desparate that they damage the suspension of disbelief at the very last possible moment."

"[P]lenty of satisfying incidents, developments, couplings, and luminous descriptions of life in that ghostly, light-amplified world...Watts writes confidently and well.  A highly interesting and thoroughly-researched debut novel."

"The story drives like a futuristic locomotive. It's a hypnotic read, somber and compelling. Best thing I've read in a long time. Peter Watts is an author to watch for."

"The speculative spin on a locked-room mystery would be enough to make it readable, but its setting gets it singing.  Watts creates a meticulously solid environment into which he shanghais his dysfunctional heroes ... a satisfying, complex first outing."

"A strong debut, featuring several powerfully-drawn characters, with a nicely sketched background of culture and technology... Perhaps most unusual, especially for a first novel, is the author's ability (guts?) to end the book with several questions unresolved, leaving readers to put the pieces together and answer some nasty questions on their own."

"...a gritty deep-sea tale ... a restrained yet chilling subplot ... Watts's evocation of the nightmarish claustrophobia of Beebe Station is good, and he writes well and with authority about the weird beauty of the vents and their strange inhabitants. He's clearly in for the long haul."

"... suffers from a clumsy episodic structure which doesn't quite knit together ... a relentless melodramatic pitch, and far too much synthetic angst — its characters find it hard to get through a door without suffering a nervous breakdown. 

"In Starfish, Watts creates in his protagonist a poetry of dysfunction which is angry and eerily redemptive, and which makes compelling, almost compulsive reading."

"...a hard-nosed dystopian page-turner...a sleek and stylish sci-fi début; rife with grave ecological warnings, Watts' novel is also ripe with promise for this Toronto biologist-turned- novelist."

"A high-quality first SF novel ... an impressive array of state-of-the-art scientific ideas...Watts feels a lot like [Brian] Stableford in his deep knowledge of biology and his realistic, rather cynical characters operating amidst complex scientific bureaucracies."

"...a very impressive book, highly original in its setting and unusually ingenious in the careful combination of information from several different scientific fields."

"Watts's magical descriptions ... enchant the reader.  In Starfish, Watts stretches the boundaries of humanity up, down, and sideways to see whether its dimensions reveal anything we'd be proud to be a part of."

"Watts is certainly a writer with talent— his prose is crisp and efficient, he introduces us to a compelling variety of misfit characters in his opening chapters, and his idea of a world-threatening biohazard is both original and convincing...Lenie Clarke in particular is a fascinating and multileveled invention. Watts does his homework and thinks things through... a fine craftsman."

"...at times [Watts] seems so fascinated with his own setting and characters that he forgets, until almost too late, to set them in motion...the one thing I'm not convinced of is that he yet has a firm grasp on the difference between a dramatic situation and a story"

"With gritty action and realistic science, Peter Watts brings to life a dark and vivid world."

"The story is murky and claustrophic, well-imagined and well-realized.  I'll give you just a little hint about one of the scariest elements in anything I've read this month:  Not all recovered memories are real."

"...well-orchestrated paranoia that recalls the classic SF tale Who Goes There? ...the underwater setting and the technology function as characters in their own right, and quite vigorously. The novel's pacing is excellent, making this, overall, a good bet."

"An interesting, entertaining, and most of all, promising debut novel" div

"A pleasing combination of hard-sf and solid story-telling... [Lenie Clarke's] development from utterly passive victim into the de-facto leader of the rifters is well handled and intriguing"

"Integrating the deeply self-focused milieu of the rifters with a melodramatic save-the-world storyline, [Watts] bleeds off much of the novel's power... There is considerably less impact in watching them play out the endgame once the seabed's mystery has been clarified."

"You'll be spitting grit out from between your teeth after this one.  It's dark.  It's dirty.  It's oppressive.  It's a helluva first novel."

"Science fiction, as a genre, is obliged to consistently reinvent itself or lose freshness.  One of the many virtues of Starfish is that Peter Watts has succeeded in making the deep-sea setting all his own.  Read Starfish by all means, but don't expect Captain Nemo.  Expect Peter Watts.  Watts is more interesting."

"A character-driven thriller, incorporating along the way a number of disturbing speculations derived from current real-life scientific developments…Peter Watts has combined his scientific expertise with a gift for sublime storytelling."

"Compelling and excellently written, evoking an almost palpable sense of dread."

"A harsh, intelligent look at a future of real physics, real biology, and sadly real governmental bureaucracies."

"A good job, but I didn't like it at all."

...a wonderfully complex, emotionally charged read. Watts has mixed hard science, soft science, and that wondrous alchemy which talented writers possess, to produce an SF novel that reads like a thriller. Good hard SF, a little horror, and a bit of mystery, all in one book -- now that's a rarity.

The unpleasant world that Watts is constructing is certainly a world worth visiting, if you're not prone to depression upon reading well-rendered dystopian visions. ... Starfish is quite something. Every detail is front-loaded with a suggestive background. Every dark space hides another, larger space with more details.