Short Fantasy Story Review James Morrow The Raft Of The Titanic

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Spoiler alerts – 2010 – Mammoth Press A clever allegorical fantasy and alternative history work. In 1912 as The Titanic starts to sink, two engineers get the passengers and crew to help fashion a giant raft, and all but twenty passengers survive the sinking by getting on the raft. The Captain stubbornly goes down with the ship. The large raft still separates steerage, middle class and wealthy passengers as it drifts away from the wreck site, leading the rescue ships to think everyone went down inside the hull, so no one searches for the survivors. The raft drifts on, and after a brief dabbling in cannibalism, in which the men blamed for the disaster are eaten more from revenge than hunger the strange vessel drifts on, and gains the name Ada. With food salvaged from other wrecks they pass, life on the raft settles down, and the pssengers even build their own squash court. When they find petrol engines, they know they could navigate to shore but they enjoy their new society too much, especially when a Bolshevik revolution is foiled in favour of Democratic Socialism. Two years on from the iceberg incident, Ada becomes a floating sovereign independent state and declares neutrality in World War One. Sailors shipwrecked in battle are welcomed on board as long as thy renounce the fighting and their country of origin. The raft sails on. Inventive, and rather obviously impossible if taken as realism, but certainly a happier fate than befell the real passengers of the ill-fated Titanic. Arthur Chappell