Starfish

Front Cover
Macmillan, Apr 29, 2008 - Fiction - 320 pages

Civilization rests on the backs of its outcasts.

So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometers below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have preadapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place. It's a small price to keep the lights going, back on shore.

But there are things among the cliffs and trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find, and enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made of iron. At first, not even the rifters know what they have in them—and by the time anyone else finds out, the outcast and the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet...

 

Contents

BENTHOS
17
CONSTRICTOR
19
A Niche
32
Housecleaning
50
NEOTENOUS
55
Elevator Boy
64
Crush
69
Autoclave
75
Shadow
100
DANCER
104
Shortcircuit
126
Critical Mass
138
NEKTON
151
JUMPSTART
153
Muckraker
157
Scream
168

Waterbed
78
Doppelgänger
84
Angel
87
Feral
98
Bulrushes
188
Ghosts
195
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor and convicted felon whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is available in 21 languages, has appeared in over 350 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for over 50 awards in a dozen countries. His (somewhat shorter) list of 20 actual wins includes the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun. Peter is the author of the Rifters novels (Starfish, Maelstrom) and the Firefall series (Blindsight, Echopraxia).