Sal is apprehended by Marine Police as she leaves a museum
in the city of Shanghai. They take her back to Sydney, her
home city.
These are the support of people who dwell on water, for the
Earth has flooded greatly and CITIES AT SEA are all that
remain of large population centres. Like everyone, Sal
wears a wrist terminal to identify and track her. She
wishes to go to work in Shanghai in a laboratory and the
authority in Sydney needs to evaluate her choice before she
will be allowed to leave.
Sal is seventeen and she wishes to have a procedure to help
her grow gills, so she could swim freely. The modification
would be genetic, meaning that a new breed of humans could
arise. Not everyone is in favour. For the first time in
five hundred years, sea ice has formed an ice floe in the
Arctic winter, while the high ridge known as Emaylia has an
accumulation of snow. The planet may be cooling again, and
both landlubbers and city dwellers will face challenges.
I enjoyed reading how the cities had come about and how
they are kept apart in case of collision, but visits are
encouraged when one draws near to another. Hydroponics and
fish provide food and land farming is considered unclean
and unhealthy. Wind vanes, turbines, solar collectors and
fusion power are sources of energy, but mainly the cities
drift on strong currents. Martin Simon, who lives in
Sydney, has clearly put a lot of thought into constructing
his future world. He considers that birth rates would be
completely managed, so physical love has come to mean
little more than casual fun to his young protagonist, and
only when someone points it out to her does Sal realise
that spending all day immersed would be hard on her skin so
she might have to be given scales or blubber - who would
want that?
The author has also researched resonant frequency,
centrifugal force, weather and other engineering issues to
make the story feel very real and we are conscious of
potential hazards when a breakaway section of raft tries to
go it alone. He believes that the more people depend on
machines for survival, the more machine-like they will
become. Sal is bravely determined to reverse the process.
Read CITIES AT SEA and decide for yourself which method
would enable humanity to survive.
A thousand years hence, all the major cities of the world
are at sea, floating on huge rafts, using ocean currents to
navigate. Sal, a young girl on the Sydney raft, training as
a navigator, visits Shanghai
which is the largest raft city of all, on holiday. She hopes
to find the famous genetic scientist, Jezzy, who will modify
her body to give her gills. She wants to be like a mermaid,
free to live in the sea with the fish.
She does meet the old woman but when she leaves her
laboratory is arrested as a deserter and mutineer. She is
flown back to her home raft for trial. After a tribunal she
is released after all to join Jezzy and like many others, is
modifed as she desired.
There is a strong public reaction against Jezzy’s
operations. In fear of being marooned to die on land, Jezzy
and her young changelings break away their section of the
Shanghai raft away drift off independently.
Sal finds a lover and gives birth, but a violent storm
damages the raft severely and they struggle to avoid
sinking. They can survive only by beaching themselves. Sal,
the young navigator, plays an important role in achieving
this.
The remnants of a land based tribe are encountered but more
dangers must be faced from marauding gangs of pirates.
The rafters make plans for rebuilding their city and
returning to the sea.
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