Science Fiction Book Review: The Watch Below by James White

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There's a really good second-hand bookshop in my city, a family business that's been operating since the 70s. Almost every time I go in there, I make a purchase. It has a particularly well-stocked science fiction section, with a lot of vintage, out of print and obscure books that you never see in the big chain bookshops. A few months ago, I picked up a book there called "The Watch Below" by James White. James White was a famous British SF writer, particularly well-know for his "Sector General" series, which I've yet to read any of. Prior to "The Watch Below", I've only read one other story by White as far as I remember, and that was decades ago. I'd never hear of this particular book, but the premise seemed intriguing when I read the blurb. I've just got around to reading it over the last few days, and it's the best novel I've read for a while. It's a clever twist on the old "generation ship" concept that's been a staple of SF for decades. The novel tells the stories of two separate groups, seperated by light years and species, but with strangely parallel experiences. The story starts in 1942, the height of World War 2. The merchant ship Gulf Trader is part of a convoy making its way across the North Atlantic from America to Britain. The Gulf Trader is a former oil tanker which is partway through being converted into a specialist ship for use by the Royal Navy. Conversion work is still going on during the voyage, so there are plenty of supplies like weilding gear etc, and just for this trip it's being used as a supply freighter, with the oil tanks loaded with huge quantiteis of food, along with some other supplies like batteries and light bulbs. These details do matter to the plot. Somewhere in the North Atlantic, the ship is torpedoed by a U Boat and starts to sink. Most of the crew abandon ship, but five are trapped in one of the empty oil tanks, which has been converted into an improvised sickbay. Three of them are injured, two female nurses and an engineer, and being treated by the ship's Doctor Radford. The ship's second in command, Liutenant-Commander Wallis is with them when the torpedoes hit, and the five of them find themselves trapped in the oil tanks. As the ship sinks, there's too much water pressure on the exit hatch to open it, so the five survivors are stuck there, in the dark, as the ship goes down. But the ship doesn't reach the bottom. There's a lot of air trapped inside those oil tanks, in fact one of the characters compares the volume to the inside of a cathedral - and this gives the wreck enough buoyancy to slow its descent drastically. In the meantime, the survivors have enough air to breath that they're not in immediate danger of death. Using the resources they have, they manage to set up a lighting system with an improvise foot-powered generator, and use some of the stored gas from the oxy-acetelyne torches to displace enough water from flooded areas of the ship to stop their descent completely. But they're still drifting underwater, with no way of escaping and not even any way of telling night from day. A nightmarish situation, but not a completely hopeless one. They find ways to recycle water so they've at least got enough to drink, and the Doctor works out a scheme to germinate some of the dried beans they've got in storage and grow them under artifivual light to absorb some of the carbon dioxide that's building up and ensure them a continuing supply of breathable air. As for food, the ship was carrying enough tinned and preserved food to last several lifetimes. It's cold and dark, and they can't see outside, but the survivors are at least alive. The ship spends several months drifting with the currents before running aground on a reef somewhere - still underwater, but at least in a stable situation. With no prospect of rescue or escape, the survivors settle into a day-to-day routine of survival. And being human, of course, they pair up, with the engineer and commander marrying the nurses. And as the weeks turn into months, then years, inevitably children are born. Meanwhile, light years away, an alien space captain is woken up from suspended animation to hear some extremely disturbing news. The Unthan flagship is at the head of a very large fleet of interstellar spacecraft which is embarking on a centuries-long journey to establish a new home. Their sun has become unstable, heating up their home planet to the point where it will become uninhabitable in the near future, so a decision was made to evacuate a significant part of their population to a new planet that their astronomers have detected. The Unthans are water-breathers who live under the sea, and the new planet that they're trying to reach is covered with oceans over the majority of its surface, and their astronemers haven't detected any signs of intelligent life. So it sounds ideal for colonisation. Of course it's no great surprise that this new planet eventually turns out to be Earth. The mission plan is fro most of the refugees to remain frozen in suspended animation, but the guidance systems that the spacecraft use aren't good enough to carry out the necessary periodic course corrections without crew intervention. So the plan is to have the flight crew spend most of their time in hibernation but be woken up periodically to check that the fleet is still on course and make any necessary adjustments before being re-frozen. This would involve most of the crew enduring 20 or so bouts of hibernation. During the first ten years of the flight, the crew of the flagship stays awake to make sure everything is working OK before going into hibernation for the first time, leaving one of the Captains on watch. But a problem has emerged in those ten years. The hibernation process was thought to be safe when they left their homeworld, but it hadn't been tested thoroughly in space. The Doctor has found that every time a subject goes into hibernation, he sustains a certain amount of brain damage. One period of freezing is likely to leave an individual slightly mentally impaired but not seriously so. But the effects are cumulative. A couple of dozen bouts of hibernation are likely to leave a crew of vegatables, completely unfit to guide the fleet to their destination, let alone land. The Captain and the Doctor work out a desperate plan, but the only one that's workable. They both volunteer to stay awake while the rest of the crew go into hibernation for the whole of the journey, only being revived when the fleet is approaching the Solar System. And in the meantime the Captain and Doctor will wake up two unlucky females from the already-frozen colonists that the ship is carrying, and mate with them. The idea is to breed successive generations who can be trained up as crewmembers and keep the fleet on course till the time comes to revive the main crew and prepare to land. So we have the stories of two ships,one a wrecked human sea ship and the other an alien spaceship, which were never designed to be generatin ships, but have been force by circumstances to house successive generations, who struggle, not only to survive, but to keep their values intact. They have similar problems of factionalism and inbreeding, and by the end of the book several generations have passed, the descendants of both crews are suffering from birth deformaties, malnutritioun and occasional mental instability. The Gulf Trader eventually becomes so rusty that the previously airtight oil tanks start to lose their integrity, and the descendants of the original survivors are so inbred and malnourished that the most likely outcome of any pregnancy is the death of both mother and baby. Meanwhile, the the main crew of the Unthan flagship have been revived to find that the life support systems on their ship are seriously degraded, the descendants of the Captain and Doctor are a fairly degenerate, embittered bunch, although they've still managed to do their inheritied duty and keep the refugee fleet safe. Except the fleet isn't safe. As they approach the Earth, their observations tell them that there's already a thriving civilisation here, which they previously had no clue about. They don't know how to communicate with the human race, and their ships don't have enough reaction mass to manouver into a safe orbit while they work out a communication method. They have no choice but to approach Earth without warning and land in the oceans. But they also realise that this will look to us like an invasion. With no means of communicating their peaceful intentions, war seams inevitable - a war of extermination that neither side really wants, but no-one knows how to prevent. And then the story of the Unthan fleet, and the story of the survivors of the Gulf Trader intersect, in a way that shocks both parties. I won't say any more, because that would be to give the ending away. First published in 1966, this is a really well-constructed story. It's barely more than 170 pages long, but James White managed to cover the story of whole generations of two different sets of survivors with both clarity and economy. White came from a medical background, and he manages to include enough description of how the survivors of the Gulf Trader survived to make this admittedly far-fetched premise convincing. Both the human and alien characters are lightly-sketched, but he tells us enough about them to be sympathetic. It's hard science fiction, nothing included that's absolutely outside the realms of possibilty, and a novel idea. I give this story a solid 8/10. I think I'll be reading more James White in the near future.