Science fiction blended with action adventure – the techno thriller – has been around since Ian Fleming first outfitted James Bond with an Inspector Gadget-sized arsenal of hi-tech toys. But the excitement and intrigue of techno-thriller plots tend to dominate any examination of technological progress. Peter Watts, a marine biologist and SF writer, is an exception to the rule. The scientific extrapolation of Maelstrom, his second novel, is as thoroughly thought through as the plot – and what a plot it is!

Beebe Station is an underwater geothermal power plant at the mouth of an undersea rift vent off the Pacific coast of North America. The workers at Beebe Station have unwittingly released ßehemoth, a microbe that is relatively harmless at deep sea levels, but, if brought to the surface, will infect and exterminate all land-based life. Maelstrom picks up where Watts’s first novel, Starfish, left off; the world authorities, realizing the threat posed by ßehemoth, detonate an atomic bomb that pulverizes Beebe Station.

Lenie Clarke of Beebe Station has survived the explosion. Lenie knows that she’s been infected with something, and as far as she’s concerned, the whole damned world is responsible, since it has just tried, and failed, to kill her. Lenie’s a walking Typhoid Mary, unstoppable because of the alterations to her body that allowed her to work in ocean depths.

Watts displays a gleefully macabre inventiveness combined with scientific rigour. From the chaotically alive maelstrom that the World Wide Web has become to his disturbing ruminations on the uses of conscience, Maelstrom is a dark, sardonic, and uncompromisingly moral book. I strongly disagreed with many of Maelstrom’s despairing, deterministic conclusions about human behaviour and motivations, but for the duration of this excellently wrought fictional argument, I found myself willing to grant Watts his premises so that I could keep turning the pages.