Living in the abyss: Medusa’s Children (1977) by Bob Shaw

An entertainingly wild aquatic adventure on two worlds

Originally published in 1977, Medusa’s Children is a mid-period novel by Northern Irish SF writer Bob Shaw. Out of print since 1988, it is an aquatic adventure which exploits one of Shaw’s most outlandish concepts to bring together two narrative threads set in radically diverse environments. 

By 1977, Shaw was a well-established writer in fan and professional circles. He had recently published Orbitsville (1975), which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel, and then A Wreath of Stars (1976), which the writers of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia have described as “perhaps his finest” individual novel. 

While not quite at the level of Shaw’s formidable best, Medusa’s Children is beguilingly strange and inventive, weaving together biological speculation, matter transmission, and even ancient aliens.

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Squid goals

For around half of the novel, Shaw alternates between two very different perspectives. Later, these merge as the story approaches its climax. 

The novel opens in a bizarre underwater environment. Myrah is part of a small community of humans living submerged in a giant ball of water, essentially a liquid planet. To survive, they must constantly scavenge for bubbles of air which they trap within special helmets. Their society is primitive, with no technology to speak of. Their lives are nasty, brutish, and short due to rampant disease and the predations of an aggressive squid-like species.

Meanwhile, Tarrant is a not-terribly-competent aquafarmer operating in the Pacific Ocean. A former pilot and deserter, his aims are to keep a low profile and to romance Beth, a young woman who lives nearby. His efforts are frustrated by Beth’s controlling, conservative parents. Worse, his farm is threatened by an aggressive squid-like species…

Meeting the siphonophore

Although Shaw’s two watery worlds are obviously connected from early on in the novel, part of the charm of Medusa’s Children is the outlandish idea which links them. 

Both Myrah and Tarrant grapple, quite separately, with the same monstrous creatures - which Myrah’s people know as Horra. It is also apparent that Myrah’s bleak, submerged home cannot be on Earth, due to its lack of dry land and its very low gravity. The puzzle of where Myrah’s people are, and how they got there generations ago, is the main driver of the book’s first half. 

The explanation is easily one of Shaw’s wilder ideas, and when it comes, Medusa’s Children steps up a few gears. It transpires that Tarrant and Myrah each live close to one end of an extraordinary piece of ancient alien technology. Millions of years previously, long-departed aliens set up a matter transmission system as a means of regulating and stabilising Earth’s sea levels. 

Excess seawater was transported across the solar system and into space, kept liquid to form a glob of ocean held loosely together by a weak gravitational force. It is implied that Myrah’s community are the inbred descendants of unfortunate travelers, inadvertently caught in the device’s transmission field in a kind of Bermuda Triangle scenario generations earlier. 

Shaw also introduces a vast, sentient sea creature which evolved from Earth animals also caught by the alien device. Known as Ka by Myrah’s people and worshipped by some of them as a god, this immense entity is a hyper-evolved form of a siphonophore, some of the strangest species in Earth’s oceans. Through this element, Shaw explores interesting concepts about evolution, distributed intelligence, and unusual methods of survival.

A liquid world

Of the two halves of Medusa’s Children, the second is easily the strongest. In the first half, Tarrant’s down-to-Earth story is not particularly compelling, and his efforts to form a relationship with Beth go nowhere, existing largely to pad out the page count. While the sexual politics of the novel are dubious, they are interesting and Shaw even briefly flirts with body horror as Ka demonstrates his ability to extend his influence.

It is when Shaw begins to unfurl his mysteries that the novel improves, and while it never reaches the level of a novel like A Wreath of Stars or The Palace of Eternity, it is definitely entertaining. It may not be the best entry point into Shaw’s body of work, but established fans would do well to pick it up, should a copy cross their path.

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• Shaw had previously featured marine farming in his fairly weak novel The Shadow of Heaven (1969), in which it is used to feed the population after a collapse of conventional agriculture on land.
  
• While Medusa’s Children has been out of print for many years, it is available in the UK as an ebook, as part of the Gollancz SF Gateway.