★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The Deep
• Author: Rivers Solomon (with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes)
• Year: 2019
• Pages: 155*
• Genre: Fantasy, alternate history
• Publisher: Saga Press (Simon & Schuster)
• ISBN 978-1-5344-3986-3 (hardcover)
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not including afterword by clipping. or acknowledgements)

 

Summary

The Deep was inspired by (or is the novella form of) a song of the same name by rap group clipping., made up of Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes. The song (listen) was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation — Short Form in 2018 (it lost to an episode of The Good Place). That song in turn had been inspired by the work of Detroit duo Drexciya, which first developed the myth of a “nautical afrofuturist” society populated by the offspring of pregnant African women who were thrown off slave ships, the babies having magically adapted to breathe underwater. (Reading the book does not require any previous knowledge of the clipping. song or Drexciya’s story.)

This book tells the story from multiple viewpoints, but mostly from that of Yetu, a historian for the undersea race — the wajinru. With most wajinru insisting on living in the now without longterm memories, each generation chooses one historian who remembers everything and shares those memories once a year in a giant ceremony. This system works well for everyone except Yetu, who cannot bear the pain of the memories, nor the erasure of self it imposes.

(Click here to read Jason Heller’s review for NPR.)

 

Praise

The story was beautifully and painfully written in clear prose. It reads quickly — not only because the book is short but because there’s little to misunderstand and most sentences seem to flow naturally from the preceding sentences.

Following are a couple of quotations that stood out to me:

“They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed their instincts.”

—page 11

“It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.”

—page 15

 

Points Off For...

I found little to dislike here. There were a few repetitions — telling me the same thing more than once — which might have been meant for emphasis, but in a book this short it wasn’t necessary. Mainly I withhold the fifth star on principle.

 

Conclusion

Not everyone will like or “get” this book, but I think it’s short enough and different enough that most readers of sci-fi and/or fantasy will enjoy it.

This is now my second Solomon book, the first one being hard sci-fi and getting five stars from me.

 

 

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