Book Review: The Ghost from the Grand Banks

 

© 1990 by Arthur C. Clarke

 

MAJOR SPOILERS!

 

I have mixed feelings towards Arthur C. Clarke. As a third-grader, I fondly remember buying 2001: A Space Odyssey from the Bookmobile for a few dollars and being absolutely in love with it. I vividly recall the first time I watched the Kubrick version, late at night by myself one summer night early sometime in high school. But since then, it’s been a mixed bag. Liked some short stories, dislike others. Didn’t like Childhood’s End, but kinda liked Fountains of Paradise. And still have a love-hate relationship with his Rama books.

So why the ambivalence?

Bottom line, for me at least, is his characters. They all have nondescript names, nondescript personalities, and nonexistent story arcs. I could not name a single character from the Rama books. I know of 2001’s Astronauts Poole and Bowman, but that’s from the movie. And of Childhood’s End, the only characters I remember are the demonesque aliens, and though I don’t recall their names, I know that they were at least interesting to a logophile like myself.

I will grant that he sprinkles his books with excellent ideas. That’s the main reason I’ll read them. In the case of The Ghost of the Grand Banks, the technology proposed deals with raising the Titanic from the ocean floor in the far-flung future of 2012. Now, the Titanic sits at the bottom of the North Atlantic in two halves (in an area called, obviously enough, the Grand Banks), as we all saw in the Cameron movie. One group of scientist entrepreneurs in the novel wants to raise their half by injecting billions and billions of water-resistant microspheres into the ship and lifting it with the additional aid of thirty 10,000-ton strength cables. Hmm. Interesting

Even more interesting is the idea of a second group of characters to raise their half: using the latest in electromagnetic superconducting cooling technology, they’ll bring the near-freezing water around the Titanic to just below freezing, cold enough to where a massive block of ice will form around the hull at the bottom of the sea. Ice cubes in a glass of water rise to the surface. So, as is stated in the novel, an iceberg sunk the Titanic, and another will lift her. Definitely intriguing.

But Clarke doesn’t really explore the technology. You don’t see it developed, or being installed around the sunken vessel. You don’t sweat out bugs and problems. There’s no tension, no uncertainty, no insight. It’s like I read an article about it in Scientific American (that is, before the magazine tanked into utter and insipid wokeness).

So what do we get?

Well, and here’s the big spoiler: The Titanic doesn’t get raised. The deus ex machina of all seafaring science fiction movies and books, the superstorm, comes into play. Only it’s not a hurricane but an underwater earthquake that causes a landslide buries the Titanic forever, hours before she is to leave her ocean floor grave.

Blech.

It is, however, redeemed in the epilogue: a couple million years in the future, long after man has left the solar system, as the rings of Saturn dim and Mercury is an over-mined shell of itself, an alien probe floats in and orbits Earth. Soon into its study of this third planet, it scans a mass of strange metal, a metallic alloy not normally found in nature, buried deep inside a mountain, and it decides further investigation is needed. Care to venture what that metal in the mountain is?

The epilogue increased my grade of The Ghost of the Grand Banks from a C to a B-minus.

Other Good:

- References to Project Jennifer in the opening pages.

- References to Raise the Titanic! by Clive Cussler, one of the earliest non-children’s book I read as a kid.

- A very brief primer on the mathematical oddity known as the Mandelbrot Set.

Other Bad:

- Tired cliché of the brilliant female mathematician.

- Really tired cliché of the brilliant mathematician daughter of the brilliant female mathematician.

- The actual Titanic was only the subject of 20 or 30 pages; the rest of the novel circled around five or six one-dimensional characters.

- Two main characters die with zero emotional impact

- Censoring old films by digitally editing out any references to cigarette smoking seen as an unequivocal good.

And we’re teased that the Mandelbrot Set will play a pivotal role in the book! It doesn’t (save for a minor, peripheral, weird way), but do yourself a favor and go to Youtube and watch a video on it. I did, and I think I’m not too obsessed. Really. Not obsessed at all.

Patch gets an A for effort picking this out for me. While the review sounds a tad too overtly negative, it was a page turner and I did finish it in a couple of days without putting it down. I just think of it as a wasted opportunity. What magnum opus could someone produce, someone like, say, Neal Stephenson, with Clarke’s notes for this book!

YMMV.