Tag: worldofwater

World of Water should not be confused with Waterworld, the 1995 Kevin Costner movie which it seems nobody saw and liked apart from me.

Yes, I know it’s a crap film. I knew that even before I went to the cinema to watch it. But it has some amazing set design, some memorable imagery, and a grand sense of ambition. In the mid-90s Costner was a big box office draw, and he could have chosen to play things safe. Instead, he used his star power to leverage funding for an expensive post-apocalyptic action adventure and cast himself as a somewhat unlikeable protagonist. Kudos to him for that.

My novel, despite a certain similarity of title, bears no resemblance otherwise. The second in my Dev Harmer series, it’s set on an alien world entirely made of water rather than, as in the Costner movie, our own future Earth after the icecaps have melted. Can such worlds exist?

Apparently, yes. The idea of ocean planets has been hypothesised by astronomers and cosmologists. Originally formed of ice, they melt as they migrate inward to the centre of their solar systems. Their seas are thousands of kilometres deep, with either ice at their core or else some strange alternative phase of water generated by the immense pressures. The extrasolar planet Gliese 1214 b, which orbits a star in the constellation Ophiuchus, is considered the most likely known candidate for being one.

Our own oceans on Earth are filled with life. Some of it is amazing, some creepy, and some downright terrifying. In World of Water I set myself the task of realising what kinds of aquatic life there would be on an alien ocean planet. At times I based my speculation on real examples – the hideous vampire squid, for one, and the equally unlovely anglerfish – while for other specimens I just let my imagination run wild.

I also wanted to create a humanoid water-dwelling race, and part of the challenge, and the fun, was making them simultaneously credible, otherworldly and empathetic. I did not want them to resemble in any way the Aquaphibians, the fishy race in the puppet TV show Stingray. Instead I went for something sylph-like, eerie-looking, yet strong and aggressive.

When tackling the issue of how they might communicate underwater, I first considered a variant of whalesong or dolphin-style echolocation clicks, but in the end decided on bioluminescence. Many forms of sea life, including squid and some octopuses, have light-emitting photophore cells in their skins which serve as camouflage or enable them to lure prey, confuse predators and even see certain food sources in the deep-sea darkness. I envisioned my sea-dwellers using their photophores to express thoughts and emotions, employing colours and patterns in complex configurations. In effect, they speak in light.

The seas scare and fascinate me. The pleasure of swimming offshore on a hot day is mitigated by the primordial fear of what might lurk below the waves, unseen, wishing to take a bite out of me or drag me down and drown me. I hope I’ve managed to inject some of that awe and dread into World of Water.

World of Water is out now!
Buy: US|eBOOK

Brace for a downpour, folks: today is the day that World of Water, James Lovegrove’s latest Dev Harmer adventure, is unleashed upon us.

You can now catch up with Dev – last seen getting hot under the collar in World of Fire – as he visits the ocean world of Robinson D for a relaxing holiday. No, scratch that. What we meant was ‘for a battle with an ancient God-beast and a race against time as his own body fails him.’

To celebrate, the very brilliant James Lovegrove has written a piece for us all about his World of Water hero. Read on for more…

World of Water is out now!
Buy: US|eBOOK

Who is Dev Harmer?

The heroes of the golden age of pulp fiction were a mixed bunch. For every noble superman like Doc Savage there was a cackling madman like the Shadow. For every stony-faced arbiter of justice like the Avenger there was a weirdly masked vigilante like the Moon Man. For every square-jawed, two-fisted private detective like Nick Carter there was a mystically-inclined crimefighter like the Green Lama.

While writing the first of my Dev Harmer novels, World of Fire, I was mainlining pulp heroes. For some reason I’d developed a sweet tooth for their high-flown, often absurd adventures. Most of these were penned at breakneck speed by penny-a-word hacks who didn’t give a damn about things like quality prose or logical continuity and cared only about fulfilling contracts and meeting deadlines. Their work lacks finesse and subtlety but nonetheless, at its best, has a crude panache and an undeniable brio.

I decided that, since I was beginning an SF adventure series myself, I would take a leaf out of their books. The hero of my stories would be a distillation of various pulp figures, a modern-day variant. Flawed, reluctant, self-deprecating, self-destructive, with a smart mouth and just enough brains to back it up, he would, I hoped, endear himself to readers in spite of his drawbacks and have a distinct flavour of his own.

His name – Dev Harmer – came to me out of nowhere. When I was young we lived across the road from a farm owned by a family called Harmer (naturally my sisters and I would refer to the patriarch of this clan as Farmer Harmer). The surname implies destructiveness and the infliction of injury, and it seemed to suit the character. As for the Dev part, it’s an abbreviation, short for something – but what that something is, only I and Dev know, and neither of us is telling. It’s no accident, though, that “dev” is the first syllable of another word for demon.

Dev is a victim as well as a protagonist. Almost against his own will, he has had his consciousness digitised and is then beamed across the known universe to various trouble spots, a bolt of pure information which can be downloaded into an environment-suitable clone body. On every new world he visits he wakes up in a brand new host form and must embark on a dangerous mission, all in the hope and expectation that one day he will regain his original body. His enemies are an AI race, Polis+, who are engaged in a futuristic Cold War with humankind. The two empires have reached a state of détente, and Dev’s job is to help maintain the peace.

To tell his stories in an appropriately terse, racy fashion, I elected to alter my own prose style to emulate that of the pulp fictioneers. One basic rule I set myself: no paragraph longer than three sentences. I haven’t always kept to this rule in the novels, but exceptions are few. I thought it would be a restriction, but in fact it’s been liberating. It has forced me to rethink my writing strategies and stopped me being lazy and falling back on old, well-thumbed techniques.

Dev’s new mission sees him sent to a water world where the local indigenes are in a state of rebellion, chafing with resentment at a human military presence on their planet. As he investigates, he learns that there’s more to these “restless natives” than meets the eye and that something huge and Lovecraftian is lurking in the deeps, awaiting its moment to rise.

If, with my Dev Harmer tales, I’ve managed to recapture some of the thrill and energy of the pulp pager-turners, while giving them a bit of polish and a twenty-first-century sensibility, I’ll consider them a success.