''In the Ocean of Night'' is a

1977 Events January * January 8 – Three bombs explode in Moscow within 37 minutes, killing seven. The bombings are attributed to an Armenian separatist group. * January 10 – Mount Nyiragongo erupts in eastern Zaire (now the Democrat ...

fix-up A fix-up (or fixup) is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency, and sometimes new connecting material, such as a frame s ...

hard science fiction Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell's ''Islands of Space'' in the Novemb ...

novel by American writer

Gregory Benford Gregory Benford (born January 30, 1941) is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is professor emeritus at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a contributing editor of ''Reas ...

. It is the first novel in his

Galactic Center Saga The Galactic Center Saga is a series of books by author Gregory Benford detailing a galactic war between mechanical and biological life. * '' In the Ocean of Night'' (1977) — 1977 Nebula Award nominee, 1978 Locus Award nominee * ''Across the Sea ...

. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1977, and for the Locus Award the following year. ''In the Ocean of Night'' was first published as a series of novellas and novelettes from 1973 to 1977.

Plot summary

In 1999 (2019 in the second edition), Nigel Walmsley, a British scientist and astronaut for

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

, is sent to attach a

thermonuclear bomb A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lowe ...

to a comet named Icarus which is on a direct collision course for

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. Icarus turns out to be large, solid, and made of a nickel-iron composite. Nigel is instructed to plant the weapon and leave so it can be detonated. He persuades Mission Control to let him put it in a large fissure he discovered, so it would be even more effective. In the fissure, Nigel discovers strips of metal worked in obviously artificial patterns. Awestruck at this evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, Nigel begins exploring. Icarus is made up of a number of hollow shells, making the asteroid's mass far less than predicted. NASA insists that the demolition has to go forward, claiming Icarus would skip off the atmosphere and land in the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by t ...

, causing widespread damage from the resultant

tsunami A tsunami ( ; from ja, 津波, lit=harbour wave, ) is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater exp ...

. Nigel realizes this is a lie, and convinces his partner of that. They hide the nuke and spend the next week retrieving artifacts and materials before detonating the bomb. 15 years after their discovery the Icarus artifacts have yielded little, and Nigel's delayed detonation of Icarus has alienated him from NASA and other people. Nigel's partner, Alexandria, dies from systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease caused by pollution. An anomaly near Jupiter distracts Nigel: something, nicknamed 'the Snark', is repeating radio broadcasts. The anomaly fires its fusion engines and reveals itself to the satellites around Jupiter. As a probe vessel, the Snark's directing computer could not afford to ignore the satellites' radio emissions before it moved on to Earth. Eventually the JPL team locates the Snark around Venus. Nigel hijacks the communications, transmitting his own signal to the Snark. The Snark receives the signal as a sign of non-hostile intentions and transmits back. It also reaches out through Nigel's medical implants to his dead partner's more elaborate ones, and commandeers her body to explore and learn about Earth. The initial tentative transmissions blossom into a largely one-way torrent of information for the Snark. One day, it asks to visit Earth. A compromise is worked out: the Snark will orbit the Moon until trust is built up. As Nigel is already fully informed, he is assigned to pilot the space ship (armed with another nuke) and meet the Snark. Nigel meets the Snark, which disables Nigel's conventional weapons and begins talking to him. It says that organic civilizations and species are inherently unstable; they flash brilliantly and commit suicide sooner or later. The autonomous machines they craft live on long after them, going on and evolving. But they cannot truly compete with the organics, who live "in the universe of essences". That is the reason for the Great Silence. Nigel's superiors order him to use the nuclear weapon, but he refuses. They override him and fire it anyway but the Snark flees the Solar System faster than the missile can follow. The decision to fire is covered up, but Nigel blackmails NASA into letting him go to the Moon; the Snark had directed a transmission at

Mare Marginis Mare Marginis (Latin ''marginis'', the "Sea of the Edge") is a lunar mare that lies on the very edge of the lunar nearside. The selenographic coordinates of this feature are 13.3° N, 86.1° E, and the diameter is 358 km. The name is Latin ...

for unknown parties, and Nigel wanted to find those parties. Four years later, Nigel is now based on the Moon. A fellow astronaut, Nikka, is involved in a crash that accidentally discovers a still active alien spacecraft wreck in the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...

– a spacecraft suspiciously armed with a once-powerful anti-spacecraft weapon. Nigel and Nikka explore the wreck, and find a functioning computer with a direct neural interface. Nigel and several others experiment with the computer's neural hook-up, and leave fundamentally changed by it, while the computer becomes inert and unable to reveal any more about its creators. Meanwhile, on Earth, some surprising experiments in human genetics conducted by the aliens are discovered alive in North America.

References

External links

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''In the Ocean of Night''
at Worlds Without End {{DEFAULTSORT:In The Ocean Of Night 1972 American novels American science fiction novels Fiction about the Apollo asteroids Novels by Gregory Benford Novels about impact events Novels set on the Moon Works originally published in If (magazine) Hard science fiction 1977 American novels 1977 science fiction novels Fiction set in 1999 Fiction set in 2019