More than 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. And yet, when it comes to planet-based science fiction stories, most take place on dry land, either here on Earth or on some other world.
But in the new short story anthology Depth Charge (paperback, Kindle), iconic science fiction writers including Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, and Fritz Leiber give us tales that are all set underwater, at least in part.
In the following email interview, co-editors Hank Davis and Jamie Ibson talk about how this collection came together, how the stories were chosen, and which they think could work really well in theaters alongside Avatar, Aquaman, and other movies that are all wet.
Hank Davis (and Pixel), Jamie Ibson
To start, what is the theme of Depth Charge? What kind of stories are in this anthology?
Hank: In the fifties, pioneering sf anthologist Groff Conklin, who really ought to have an award named after him, did a number of significant anthologies of stories devoted to a theme, such as robots, mutations, other dimensions, and so on, and these became known as theme anthologies.
Such books enjoyed a heyday in the 1960s and 1970s by other anthologists, including very loose themes, such as Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, whose theme was publishing stories which were supposedly too controversial to be published in the sf magazines of the time. George Alec Effinger once joked about doing an anthology, Great Science Fiction About Breakfast Foods. (That was a joke, but I know of a couple of stories which would fit.)
Depth Charge is an example of this long tradition, and this time the theme is stories happening underwater, in part or in whole, or at least connected with happenings below the waves.
If I seem to be waffling in that last sentence, it’s because one of the stories doesn’t have the viewpoint character going underwater, fortunately for her, but she’s interacting with a character who has been redesigned to breathe either air or water. And I’ll emphasize that word “underwater” rather than “undersea” because the location of the action doesn’t involve anything that a normal sized human would call a “sea,” but to the microscopic characters in what is only a pond, that little body of water is not only an ocean but their entire world.
The stories are nearly all science fiction, though I couldn’t resist including one story, “Fish Story,” involving mermaids. However, the story is very short, and is by that grand master of sf and fantasy short-short, Fredric Brown, and comes with his usual sting at the end, so I hope the readers will find the pinch of fantasy to their liking.
Come to think of it, it’s really a hard fantasy, paralleling hard science fiction stories by the likes of Clarke, Clement, and Niven, in that it considers what a certain activity of mer-folk would be like, if they did exist.
The stories are linked by theme, but I also hope they have in common that all are very good stories, but that’s for the reader to decide.
Who came up with the idea for Depth Charge?
Hank: The idea for the theme of the book was thunk up by Sean C.W. Korsgaard, who also came up with the neat title, as well as offering a list of stories to be included. He originally was going to be the co-editor of the book, but he and Baen had a parting of the ways, so Jamie Ibson was brought on board to fill that job description.
Sean also deserves credit for suggesting several of the stories which are in the book, one example is James Blish’s classic “Surface Tension,” which I might not have thought of, and Brad R. Torgesen’s “Ray Of Light,” which I was not previously familiar with.
In some cases, he suggested authors whose stories were very long, novella length, which led me to suggest alternates by the same authors, at shorter length, such as Mary Rosenblum’s “The Mermaid’s Comb,” for which I substituted her “Selkies.” Both stories were very good, but the latter story is shorter, leaving more space for more authors.
A less successful substitution was that Sean suggested Roger Zelazny’s “The Eve Of Rumoko,” another novella, and I thought the same author’s “The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth,” was not only shorter, but logged more scenes underwater, and was a much better story, not to mention being an award-winner. Alas, we couldn’t get that story, so virtue is not always rewarded.
Sean and I had drawn up independent lists of appropriate stories we fondly remembered, and there were some titles in common, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Deep Range.” After that, we had some discussion about the stories, I had the PC read me the stories which were new to me, and Sean and I did some back and forth, later followed by Jamie Ibson and I doing more back and forth, then came the hard part of doing an anthology: getting permission to reprint each story, which was Jamie’s department.
Arthur C. Clarke
So, what did you think of the idea behind Depth Charge, and what was it about this idea that made you want to work on it?
Jamie: I thought it was a really cool idea. I remember watching SeaQuest DSV as a teenager, which was a bit like Star Trek but underwater. And I’ve also seen a meme online that jokes about “Hey, NASA, why are you trying to explore space when there’s a whole ocean full of wild physics and biology and other craziness to be found?” And the answer given is, “They did take a look at the life beneath the ocean and concluded that, given the horrors they discovered there (lampshading Cthulhu mythos), they needed to get as far away from the planet as quickly as possible.
Hank: I [also thought] it was a good idea for a theme anthology, and since I was assigned to be co-editor, I did the best job I could for selecting stories, and Sean, who also selected stories, probably did likewise. It’s not the book I wish it were, due to budget limitations, restrictions on length, and problems with authors and agents, but that’s always the case.
And how hard was it to get the stories for Depth Charge?
Jamie: It wasn’t all that difficult to find agents for the author’s who’ve passed, but one author in question didn’t ever have an agent or representative, so that proved a bit more tricky. In that case, I did some social media digging, found someone on the author’s Facebook profile who was family, and contacted them. The cousin, I think, who was not only an author but was physically at a convention the weekend I reached out, one where a bunch of friends and colleagues I’d worked with at, too. So I pointed cousin at them to establish my bona fides, and with that established, the cousin put me in touch with the author’s adult children, who then gave us permission to use the story. That was about as complicated as it got.
In other cases, it was just a question of sending out emails, and everyone agreed without too much trouble. We did have a few agents who made rather unreasonable demands for their clients’ stories, so we wrote those off pretty quickly. Otherwise it came together well.
Now, the stories in Depth Charge includes ones by such iconic science fiction writers as James Blish, Robert Silverberg, and Arthur C. Clarke, among others. But are there any stories from writers who aren’t as well known, or the stories themselves aren’t well known?
Hank: There is a story called “The Song Of Uullioll” by Gray Rinehart, who certainly deserves to be better known, but credit for that story goes to Sean, who called it to my attention. And I’m not just praising the story because — full disclosure — Gray is a co-worker at Baen.
Jumping off from your question, I think there are a lot of once-luminary sf writers who are in danger of falling into obscurity and becoming unknown to new generations of readers. A few years ago, I read a news piece where a writer was lamenting that Bing Crosby, at one time a household name was slipping into obscurity, and I’m afraid that may be happening to some of my all-time favorites, such as Murray Leinster, Fritz Leiber, Fredric Brown, Alfred Bester, and too many more.
I have frequently anthologized stories by Leinster and Brown, And Clifford D. Simak, whom I should have mentioned before.
This time, I couldn’t recall any short sf by Leinster which fit (a novel, but no short works), and the only underwater Simak I knew was not one of his best stories, maybe because it was published in the 1930s, but I did include a short fantasy by Brown. It may be that James Blish, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (separately and together) are in danger of being forgotten into obscurity. If so, here they are again in a shiny new package. Wake up, young readers, it’s good stuff. You don’t even have to thank me…
I would think that some underwater sci-fi stories are just space stories set underwater, while others could only happen underwater. In deciding what stories to include in Depth Charge, did you take this into consideration? Like, did you make a point of including only stories that had to take place underwater, or make sure at least some weren’t space stories that were set underwater?
Hank: I am not going to say, “We need to define our terms here,” at least not out loud, but a story can be told in different ways, and wet or dry or in vacuum is only one factor. Back in the early days of Galaxy, which was one of the three top sf magazines of the 1950s through the mid 1970s, the magazine often ran a page with an extract of a Western story on one side of the page, and an excerpt from an sf story on the other side, told with similar description, nearly the same dialogue, but horses and six-shooters on one side and spaceships and ray guns on the other, and nearly the same dialogue, and below that the claim, “You’ll never see it here in Galaxy!”
The point was that a story in Galaxy wouldn’t be only sf merely by virtue of the window dressing. Good point, though I think it’s a little too glib an dismissal of space opera, and I’d also cite the time Fredric Brown mentioned that a fantasy story can be made an sf story by putting a gee-whiz gadget in place of a magic wand or spell, giving the example of the legend of King Midas, and suggesting the reader imagine an eminent person who is approached by a visiting alien who treats him with a machine that changes his molecular structure so that everything he touches turns to gold, and so on.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that I’m not greatly bothered if a story could be changed so that the same story works on dry land, or in space, or on another planet with unusual characteristics on the surface. And I wasn’t thinking about that at all when I made my choices. (I can’t speak for how Sean thought about his selections.)
But maybe I should define terms. Four of the stories are set in waters on other planets, including one classic which is set on a watery Venus which, we now know, does not exist. And if I could have gotten the aforementioned Zelazny story, there would be a second such story in the book.
These are not happening on Earth, but they are not happening in space, or, I should say, have no such scenes (even if the Blish story has a “spaceship”). I suppose Robert Silverberg’s “The Four” could have orbiting space colonies carrying the survivors of a worldwide atomic war instead of the survivors being in undersea colonies, but I think the undersea setting works better. And again, the top priority is to have good stories.
Robert Silverberg
Jamie: One of the things I really enjoyed when reviewing stories was how the modern understanding of our own solar system has evolved since those stories were written. “Back in the day” astronomers theorized that beneath the Venusian clouds, the planet could be host to massive oceans as the cloud cover might insulate the planet from the heat of the sun. And this was clear especially in “Clash By Night” [by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore] where Earth is no longer inhabited but survivors have colonized Venus and created a military / civil social distinction where the warfighters live apart from the undersea domes and are mercenaries who fight on behalf of the domes for control of territory.
In a similar vein, I would think it would be easy to find sci-fi stories that take place underwater and on Earth. But Depth Charge also includes stories that take place underwater on other planets. Was this intentional? Did you want to include stories set on other worlds, or not have all the stories set on Earth?
Hank: Once again, I can’t speak for Sean, but the initial list of proposed titles he drew up had stories set on Earth and also in other worldly waters (hmmm…that might make a good anthology title), so I suspect he wasn’t making the distinction that you’re making here.
As for me, the titles on my list similarly had both kinds of stories. I wasn’t thinking about it as a criterion at all. I’m sure an anthology of underwater stories set on Earth only could be compiled, but that wasn’t what I was aiming for. Compiling a book of underwater stories, or maybe under-some-other-liquid, as on Jupiter or another gas giant) would be trickier, but might be possible. But that wasn’t the objective here.
I repeat myself, but the criterion was for good stories which were also wet.
As you said, all of the stories in Depth Charge are science fiction, save for Fredric Brown’s “Fish Story.” But what kinds of science fiction are included?
Jamie: There’s a blend of the post-apocalyptic (Brad R. Torgersen’s “Ray Of Light”), thrillers (Jack Vance’s “The Gift Of Gab,” Mary Rosenbaum’s “Selkies”), and others that are harder to define.
Hank: “Surface Tension” by James Blish is also a space exploration story, in more ways than one.
“The Song Of Uulloll” by Gray Rinehart is also a first contact story.
“The Four” by Robert Silverberg is also a post-nuclear holocaust story, a subgenre which was once more popular, and may make a comeback, thanks to the real world antics of Red China and its playmates in the nuclear club.
“The Gift Of Gab” by Jack Vance is a problem-solving story of the sort beloved by the late, great John W. Campbell, who originally published it. The characters must find a way to prove that creatures on an alien planet are sentient beings, and not mere animals. That puzzle is still active, since Baen (pardon the plug) has recently published two novels, Ribbon Dance by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and The Icarus Changeling by Timothy Zahn, both of which have that puzzle as part of the story.
And the novella “Clash By Night” by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore is a military science fiction classic, published long before that type was recognized as a subgenre.
And if I add that Arthur C. Clarke, in “The Deep Range,” is consciously writing an underwater cattle-range Western, that should whet the potential readers’ appetites.
Hollywood has made some underwater sci-fi movies over the years: The Abyss, Aquaman, Underwater… Are there any stories in Depth Charge that you think would work particularly well as a movie?
Hank: I think Kuttner and Moore’s “Clash By Night” would make a terrific movie, and it’s a pity that Catherine L. Moore, who did TV and movie scripts herself, is no longer around to do the honors. But I don’t know if that hard-boiled ending could be kept. If it’s a hit, the sequel already exists, in Kuttner and Moore’s novel Fury.
Jamie: I’d also like to see “Clash By Night” as a movie. I thought the idea of clashing societies — naval mercenaries versus civil populations, where conflict is managed professionally, atomics are outlawed, “cheating” is handled appropriately by commanders, in some cases by literally shooting their own troops and “disabling” their own ships to make amends for the cheating, and then the different values and social norms between the sailor combatants and civilian populations — made for a great story. It’s easily my favorite of the bunch.
Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore
Hank: James Blish’s “Surface Tension” would also make a great sf movie, though I’m not sure the mundane audiences would be able to follow what’s going on in the story. Blish later took “Surface Tension” and combined it with other stories he wrote about people being genetically altered to fit an inhospitable planet into what is known as a fix-up novel titled The Seedling Stars. That would be too long and complicated to be made into a movie, but it could make a monumental TV miniseries.
Incidentally, there were a number of underwater sf flicks prior to the ones you cite, and I mention a few in my intro to the book, though I didn’t mention Creature From The Black Lagoon, or its sequels, or Atomic Submarine, or Monster from The Ocean Floor, with its one big eye, or It Came From Beneath The Sea, or…but I’ll stop there.
So, is there anything else you think people should know about Depth Charge?
Hank: I’d again emphasize that Sean C.W. Korsgaard, though his name isn’t on the cover, played a big part in creating, titling, and shaping the contents of the book. I’ve mentioned this in the Acknowledgements, but I think most people, unlike me, are not weird enough to read the front matter.
And I appreciate the work that Jamie did in getting permission for the stories which we were able to include. Dealing with agents and estates is not a job for the faint of heart.
Finally, if someone enjoys Depth Charge, what anthology of science fiction short stories that share a geographical or locational theme would you each suggest people check out?
Hank: None that I’ve worked on fit that description besides Depth Charge, but I recommend two original anthologies compiled by George R.R. Martin and the late Gardner Dozois, Old Mars and Old Venus. Both are filled with new stories which ignore the disappointingly real Mars and Venus which our probes have revealed, and go for the more romantic and adventurous versions of those planets that writers such as Burroughs, Brackett, Bradbury, Heinlein, and others created in pre space age times. And some of the stories in the Venus volume would fit very well in Depth Charge.
There was also a good anthology of Martian stories titled Mars, We Love You, which came out in the mid 1970s, though that might be hard to find after half a century.
Ditto for two even earlier books from the late 1950s and mid 1960s, The Hidden Planet, an Ace paperback anthology of stories set on Venus, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, and Farewell, Fantastic Venus, an anthology of stories set where the title tells you they’re set and edited by Brian Aldiss. It was assembled after a Soviet space probe landed on the planet and made it clear that the planet was a stand-in for Hell, if without imps or brimstone, and gathered more stories of the Venus we wanted but didn’t get. Dell books published an abridged paperback edition on this side of the Atlantic, and gave it the very lame title of All About Venus.
Jamie: I am really proud of the work I helped with on Freehold: Resistance and Freehold: Defiance. Both are set in Michael Z Williamson’s Freehold universe, and I acted as Mike’s “Deputy Vice Editor In Charge Of Continuity And Stuff” in that I had prepared a setting bible and timeline that we used to turn Resistance from an anthology into a braided novel that maintained continuity with the main novels. Each of the stories — featuring characters from both sides of the invasion of Grainne — form one continuous, chronological story that you can enjoy from beginning to end and watch “the rest of the war” take place.
