Who Goes There?

Frank Herbert is one of the most famous authors in the whole history of SF, despite the fact that most of his output continues to wallow in obscurity. How did this happen? He was born in 1920 in Washington State, raised Catholic but taking to Buddhism as an adult, served a brief stint (only six months) in the Navy during World War II, this last part being relevant to today’s story. He started out as a journalist and came to writing science fiction relatively late, already being in his thirties when his first SF story was published in 1952. A few years later and we got his first novel, serialized as Under Pressure and published in book form as The Dragon in the Sea. But that’s no what people know Herbert for. When it seemed like he was about to be another second-tier writer, doomed to be forgotten, Herbert struck gold with the serial Dune World, in Analog, which was very popular, along with its sequel serial Prophet of Dune. Both short novels, totaling eight installments, were then fused into one big novel, Dune, which became a bestseller overnight and which took home both the Hugo and the inaugural Nebula for Best Novel. The rest is history.

Of course, it’s not as simple as all that. Herbert had conducted an enormous amount of research for Dune, with this first novel in what would become a wide-spanning series taking years to gestate—unusual for genre SF at the time. Herbert wrote other novels over the next couple decades, but Dune was the thing that kept his name in the papers and on people’s minds, and indeed, even taking its faults into account, Dune was a revolutionary novel for the field. Herbert himself is a figure of some controversy, from his appropriating of Islamic culture to his well-documented homophobia to the question of whether or not he was even a good writer. Did he just happen to get lucky? I have to admit, being a third into Under Pressure, I do think there was at least some talent there.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1955 to January 1956. It was published in book form later in 1956 as The Dragon in the Sea, revised somewhat (the language is a bit saltier, for one) but otherwise the same novel as its magazine counterpart. It’s still in print, I think, although truth be told I’ve never encountered anything Herbert that isn’t Dune-related in the wild. Has anyone seen a copy of this thing?

Enhancing Image

I assume most if not everyone reading this has already read Dune, which means we’re already aware of Herbert’s writing quirks, and you’ll be pleased (or maybe not) to know some of them have already manifested in Under Pressure. Well, the good news is that this is a much smaller novel than Dune, in both length and the scope of the action. We’re not given a whole world to play with, but instead the cramped and claustrophobic world of an atomic submarine—as envisioned in the 1950s, of course. Whereas it takes seemingly forever for Paul Atreides to emerge as the “hero” of Dune, we’re immediately met with our protagonist for Under Pressure in the form of John Ramsey. Ramsey is trained as an electronic officer, but his real job and profession is as a psychologist, an ensign from BuPsych (the Bureau of Psychology) assigned to the subtug whose crew is rated as the likeliest to succeed on an upcoming oil raid. This is important for two reasons: first is that in the 21st century (around what is now the present, actually), oil has become an increasingly precious resource, with the Western and Eastern (they never say “Soviets,” but we’re clearly meant to understand the East as the Soviets) fighting for control of this resource; the second is that of the last twenty Hell Diver missions, with these subtug oil raiders, all twenty missions ended in failure. A subtug crew is very small, only four men, and with the three men aboard this one BuPsych suspects there’s a “sleeper” among them—a spy who sabotages the submarine. So you have three highly qualified men, including their captain, but one of them is (probably) a traitor.

It’s here that we’re introduced to the crew, that being Captain Sparrow and his men Garcia and Bonnett. Sparrow is sort of an Ahab or maybe Nemo figure, whom BuPsych suspects of having a screw loose, but he’s also shown to be a highly capable skipper. Garcia is a Hispanic Catholic, which is curious because I would’ve expected the subtug’s crew to be all white Americans instead of mostly. Then there’s Bonnett, whom Ramsey nails as having an inferiority complex due to being raised in an orphanage. I should mention at this point that Ramsey is a psychologist of the sort you’d expect to see in pop culture in the post-war years, which is to say he’s clearly read a ton of Freud and Jung. Under Pressure is not nearly as aggressively Freudian as some other SF works from the era, at least not yet, although I’m not sure how much of that boils down to censorship from being printed in Astounding. Magazines at the time were generally more prudish than book publishers, but this was doubly the case with magazines John W. Campbell edited. Looking at the magazine and book texts of Under Pressure, there are immediately some small but still noticeable differences. For example, at the beginning in the magazine version, Ramsey calls a snooty secretary a snob, while in the book version he calls her a bitch. Maybe if Under Pressure had been serialized in Galaxy the mildly salty language would’ve stayed, but Herbert’s brand of SF is maybe a bit too hard-nosed for that magazine. Indeed the most impressive part of this novel, aside from Herbert’s estbablishing a setting that is suffocating both physically and mentally, it’s that Under Pressure reads more as speculative fiction than science fiction. Granted that I’m not even slightly an expert on submarines and have only an elementary knowledge of nautical terminology, it’s impressive that Herbert is able to make the reader feel as if they’re learning about subs while at the same time reading a psychologically gripping adventure story.

So Under Pressure is what might be called edutainment, which is a lable I don’t see used often nowadays, but back in the pre-internet days (and indeed in the early days of the internet, i.e., my childhood) there was a whole school of pop science that worked to educate the layman while also being entertainment. Hard SF is arguably a kind of edutainment, with the caviat that hard SF, being still a kind of SF, must out of necessity work on the basis of at least One Big Lie™. The author has to fudge the numbers or put their thumb on the scales to make something SFnal. Hal Clement admitted this much in an essay that accompanied the serialization of Mission of Gravity. Incidentally, a big reason Herbert’s novel works as edutainment is that Ramsey, who for much of this is our eyes and ears, has to learn about the minutia of the subtug at the same time as the reader. He’s given a five-week crash course in being an electronics officer aboard a sub with only four crewmen, all the while reading up on his shipmates so that he can better figure out if one of them is about to crack, or if one of them is the spy the government’s looking for. Not only does Ramsey have to sniff out the spy, but he’s keeping his job as psychologist a secret from the crew. Thus we’re introduced to a game of cat and mouse, made more intense because Sparrow and Garcia are religious men and Sparrow even more so is prone to episodes of Bible-quoting religious mania.

There Be Spoilers Here

The crew discover the tucked-away corpse of the former electronics officer, who may or may not have committed suicide, but otherwise there’s not too much action in this installment. The big realization Ramsey comes to by the end is that he is quite likely to die on this mission, either through sabotage with the subtug or one of the crew killing him outright. The problem with being in a submarine is that you’re hundreds of leagues below the ocean’s surface, so that there’s no such thing as a “small” mishap aboard ship. If you’ve watched Das Boot then you have an idea as to the mortality rates of submarine crews during WWII, and while the future war of Under Pressure is clearly based off the Cold War instead, the risk has not gone down much. This first installment ends with a kind of bewildering nightmare sequence, in which Ramsey’s fears of dying in the dephs of the ocean come to the surface. It’s a reminder that Herbert can be a creepy bastard, and also that despite his tendency to jump between characters’ heads, namely Ramsey and Sparrow’s he understands psychological drama.

A Step Farther Out

As someone who is a bit of a Herbert skeptic, I have to say I’ve been enjoying this quite a bit. We’ll see where it goes.

See you next time.