Review: Into the Sunken City

Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's one strike against this book that you should be aware of before going in--most likely people who are strict about the "science" in their science fiction won't like this book at all. That is the initial premise: five hundred years from now, in a post-climate-change environmental-disaster scenario, the Earth is shrouded in permanent cloud cover that dumps constant rain on the world, to the tune of thirty feet a year, with concomitant sea level rise (the climax comes with the characters making a deepwater dive into "Vegas-Drowned," twenty-five-hundred feet down). When you logically ask how a weather pattern could hold like that, the only vague handwaved answer is that the clouds were somehow "fused," in an event called the Stitching.

To put it bluntly, this is ridiculous. I'm sure when some readers hit this so-called "explanation," they threw the book against the wall. I didn't, and I think the reason why is that this story reminded me of the Kevin Costner movie Waterworld, which is equally ridiculous but one of my guilty pleasures. Also, the characters--our narrator Jin Haldar, her sister Thara, and her ex-boyfriend Taim Mazatlan--were much better written than the worldbuilding, and succeeded in holding my interest. Jin in particular works through a lot of grief in this story, over her father's death in a diving accident, and her coming out from under this shadow was sensitively done. Jin's love for her sister, and her willingness to do almost anything to keep Thara safe, made her a moving character to root for.

The dangers and terrors of deepwater diving, and the often-monstrous sea creatures encountered at those depths, were also well depicted. I'm certainly not an expert in that area, and real experts may have considerable bones to pick, but the author seemed to have done enough research to make that part of the story sound believable. I just wish he had put more thought into his worldbuilding and had come up with a scenario that felt halfway plausible. Still, if you can get past that initial hurdle, this is an engrossing story.

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