Novel Review: The Godwhale, by T.J. Bass

Apocryphal

The Godwhale, by T.J. Bass, 1974, 281pp

T.J. Bass only authored two Science Fiction books, this one and Half Past Human. Both are set on a far-future earth when humans have evolved into small four-toed Nebbish and live in an expansive underground city called The Hive. Most of the world has been turned over to an extensive agro-meck system to make enough food to feed everyone. As one might expect, The Hive is a highly ordered society, though some people live outside of it. Both books tell the stories of the margins, where the people inside The Hive meet those wo live without.

The Godwhale opens with a character named Larry Dever. He lives in our distant future, but in the Hive's distant past. The book doesn't dwell long on his era of birth, because in the first few pages he suffers an accident and must undergo a hemicorporectomy. His broken bottom half is removed and he's fixed to a semi-sentient cyber mannequin which acts as his legs (and renal functions etc.

T.J. Bass was a doctor, and he loved describing bodily functions and the setting's future medi-teck. Larry's life on a mannequin bottom isn't easy. Here's what happens when he has to go to bed:

Larry turned on his refresher and grasped a ceiling rung of his horizontal ladder. The mannequin walked away slowly, pulling flexible tubing out of his various surgical stoma. Sucking sounds. Drops of urine and feces soiled the meck's breastplates with yellow and granular brown. Larry progressed across the monkey bars to the hot shower, where he emptied his visceral sacs down the drain. Hooking his arms through the trapeze rings, he pulled on a pair of goggles and activated the strong ultraviolet lights. Scented lather softened his flaking trunk. Wearing a terrycloth body stocking, he climbed into his hammock. More UVs focused on him as he slept.
The mannequin stood beside his bed for a while, then strolled down the hall to make records...

Life with a mannequin isn't easy, so soon Larry opts to be put into cryo-suspension, so he can be re-awakened at some future time when the medicine is good enough to re-attach proper parts.

Some generations later, Larry wakes up. One on his very own descendants greets him, and tells him he's scheduled for the surgery at long last.

"The graft will be done high in your thoracic cord. You'll keep your diaphragm and its phrenic nerves, but all your abdominal viscera will come from the C.C. donor - strong, young organs from a ten-year-old."
Larry felt weak. "A ten-year-old what?"
"Donor. Grown from your nuclear material. A carbon copy."
"A live human?"
Jen noticed his agitation. "I'm sorry, Larry. But I keep forgetting you're from an era before budding. Your bud child is not considered a human being - just a donor. Business ethics require that a donor live only long enough to donate. Of course, if the donor is viable after the organs are taken, that is a different problem. But there is no question of viability in your donor's case. The anastomosis will be too high."
Larry clumped into his mannequin.
"My bud child is to die?"
Jen didn't answer. She was hoping the mannequin would administer a tranquilizer. Larry's vasomotors were not too strong so soon after his re-warming; his blood pressure fluctuated wildly.

Naturally, Larry isn't keen on this either, so he elects to go back into suspension. When next he awakes, it's in his own far future, as garbage in the sewage pits of The Hive.

Chapter Two opens by introducing the titular character - a massive undersea bio-harvester, long neglected and forgotten, lying semi dormant and reeflike under accumulating flotsam.

A thundering surf drowned the forlorn screams of sand-locked Rorqual Maru. Brine-tossed grains of olivine and calcite buries her left eye, blocking her view of the sky. Uranus had marched twenty times through the constellations while the islands changing beaches had slowly engulfed her tail. Six hundred feet of her shapely hull lay hidden under a silted and rooted green hump of palm and frond.

Rorqual Maru is dying, so she decides to donate her remaining energies to her small benthic servomeck, Iron Trilobite, and set it free. But Trilobite thinks of Rorqual Maru as a god, so instead he goes on a mission to find humans to re-energize her. This brings him in contact with the people of The Hive, and with the wild benthic feral people of the isles. The novel will spend most of its time heading for a clash between these two groups of people.

Before then, however, we're introduced to a few new characters - Nebbish people from the Hive. Particularly, the recently retired Drum (who just wants to settle down and consume calories with flavor, for which he has saved for a lifetime) and his friend Ode. His retirement plans soon go awry, though.

A dry female appeared on the screen. Drum didn't like her air of efficiency. Thin lips clashed with the gaudy smock. "Re-certification time," she said with her pasted-on smile.
Drum's mouth opened and closed - wordless.
"Earth Society has run a little short of calories," she continued. "Water table dropped and the harvest reflected it. We must cut back on the warm - the consuming population - for the duration. Please vote for those citizens with whom you want to share next year. Hurry now. Your friends need your vote to avoid being put into Temporary Suspension - TS. Remember, however, that you must not vote for yourself or your clone litter-mates. No blood prejudice allowed."
Drum smiled nervously. He had done this before when he had his job vote to protect him...
"My votes go to the Tinker who keeps my refresher, the pipe caste member who services this wing of the city - and Grandmaster Ode."
A screen played a geometric dance as tallies ran up. The thin-lipped female reappeared long enough to announce: "You failed to receive the necessary three votes, so it is TS for you."
Drum stared as his Temporary Suspension order was printed out.
"But I'm retired," he objected. My CQB is paid up for life..."
"Your retirement CQB remains in your name while you are in TS. When the harvests improve, you will be rewarmed and can continue consuming where you were interrupted. Hurry. You have to report to the clinics immediately. The air you are breathing belongs to someone else."

Luckily, Drum spots an opportunity while on his way to the TS Clinic, and instead takes a job in the sewers. It's not the greatest job, but I suppose it's better than TS:

Nebbish workmen sat around their barracks watching the sewer bouillabaisse simmer. Drum picked up his bowl and decanted a pint of surface fluid with it's fat gobbets and flecks of green basil.
"Don't you want any jointed creatures?" offered Ode, digging deep with the ladle.
Drum grinned widely, exposing a bad set of teeth; less than half remained in the lower jaw, and none in the upper.
"There'll be no more chewing for me."
"Did you put in a request for a new set?"
"Along with my usual requests for a lens and a hip joint," said Drum. "But you know what my priority is."
Ode sat silently running his tongue over his own set of broken teeth. He could use a few White team requisitions himself. The Wet Crew sloshed in and dumped their tithe down the Synthe chute. They sat down and picked up bowls of hot soup.
"Your shift," they said.
Ode and Drum finished eating and pulled on their boots.

And this is how they meet Larry, and Trilobite, and a whole new world of adventure is opened up.

Bass is a colorful writer, and his setting is incredibly rich. The writing itself can sometimes be terse. At times, important turns in the plot are hidden in the middle of a paragraph, and things can change over the course of a sentence - so his books are not the kind that you can snooze through parts and easily catch up later. His vocabulary is also large, and scientific, which may invite you to read things twice to make sure you got them. For example:

Hypertonics dehydrated his tissues and he slipped into cryotherapy torpor.

and

The city's energy organ cracked in the blast - spilling sixteen hundred kilo-amperes of toroidal plasma, at fifty million degrees Kelvin. For a moment, a bit of the sun existed in the sewers as fusion fuel spilled, spreading ionic gas in a yellow glow.

But it's a four-colour setting, to be sure. The characters a very human, very flawed, and quite relatable considering how alien the setting is. Bass tends to focus on everyman characters (yes, a product of its time, few of the main characters are women, and they are relegated to certain roles, such as goddesses and breeders). There are no 'evil villains', just the uncaring dystopian system under which the hive operates. But that said, the story telling is sometimes takes second place to the setting and Bass' efforts to describe it. And the lingo can get in the way, especially toward the end.

But despite the flaws, they are remarkable works at which every SF fan should someday take a stab. 4.5 Stars.