Book Review: The Swarm by Frank Schatzing

The Swarm by Frank Schatzing

I make it a point to see any movie in which either New York or Los Angeles is destroyed. Sometimes, you just need to go see a goofy disaster movie.

German author Frank Schatzing's The Swarm (no relation to the goofy b-movie/bee-movie of the same name) is a goofy disaster movie in book form. And what a disaster! The oceans turn against humanity.

Some of the consequences are pretty obvious. Whale watching suddenly becomes a full-contact sport. Swarms of stinging jellyfish attack beachgoers.

But then Schatzing gets creative. Shellfish toxins delivered en masse by deep-sea crabs into the New York City water supply. Zebra mussels mutating into highly mobile forms that can chase down ships. Worms and bacteria destabilizing the methane ice that holds the North Sea continental shelf together. These are some really nasty effects and Schatzing does a nice job of backing them up with just enough science so that the reader is able to grasp the full implications of each attack.

The characters in the story are scientists, faced with a growing set of international crises that become more and more inexplicable until they begin to come to the only possible conclusion: An alien intelligence from the deep ocean has declared war on humanity. From there, the race to save the planet swings into full gear.

Schatzing's undersea super-adversary is known as the Yrr, a collective being/beings that are imbued with the expected array of superpowers. The science breaks down a bit here, although Schatzing puts a lot of effort into discussing the ideas of alternative forms of intelligence and of how an alien intelligence might interact when confronted with evidence of human intelligence. Along the way, we get a reasonable amount of discussion of the nature of intelligence in other species, particularly dolphins.

A lot of the science in this book is plausible, but a great deal isn't. Schatzing does make an effort to limit the Yrr. Some of their attacks are not actually all that effective. But in the end, they still come off as very arbitrarily powered superbeings in spite of Schatzing's attempts to dispel that cliche.

In fact, Schatzing spends a lot of time trying to dispel cliches. His characters actively discuss the films Armageddon, Deep Impact, and The Abyss among others in an effort to establish that this scenario avoids the contrivances of those fictions. But in the end, Schatzing falls back on one of the most tired of cliches to drive his plot forward: The evil military/CIA people who refuse to listen to the good scientists.

The book has some political overtones. The US president in the story is clearly a parody of President George W. Bush. He is drawn in broad caricature. The message of unforeseen consequences for environmental destruction comes across loud and clear, and Schatzing gets a bit preachy in his final epilogue in which he goes off on a tangent to discuss the religious implications of the events of the novel.

That being said, this is still a really fun read, especially once the pace picks up and the book hits its stride. Schatzing's action and fight scenes are top notch, and he does a nice job with the large scale mass destruction that fans of apocalyptic fiction are going to enjoy.

Some of the pacing with characters is a bit odd. Two characters with major roles at the end of the story are largely absent from the first half of the book. Some other characters are killed off at seemingly arbitrary spots.

But the characters themselves are generally interesting and complex, and Schatzing develops them nicely over the course of the novel so that the reader does grow to care about many of them. Even the villains are given fair treatment at first, although they tend to fall back into their cliches as the climactic events approach.

While far from perfect, this is a fun disaster thriller that will make you worry about a lot more than just getting eaten by a shark the next time you go for a swim in the ocean. Good beach read.

The Swarm was book #17 in my goal of reading 50 books in 2009.