Talk:Down to a Sunless Sea

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this book is one of my all time favourites.

[edit] Ehm... Beirut??

Edited this part: "The city has essentially descended into the status of a bombed-out London or Berlin during World War II, Saigon after South Vietnam fell, or current-day Beirut, as warring gangs fight for turf in a city without energy or fuel."

I didn't know Wikipedia dates back to the eighties ;) Beirut is actually a very nice place and has been for years (despite an assassination or two, but that's par for the region). It's about as dangerous as the actual real life New York city today, imho.

---

I was referring to current-day Beirut as it existed then, although I was unaware that Beirut was anything but a warring city currently. I have changed the reference to read "Beirut during its 1980s civil war" or something like that. Paul Robinson (Rfc1394) 00:30, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The End

So what happens at the end?

I didn't particularly want to spoil the ending for those that might want to actually read the book, but here goes. They are able to find an island that is a U.S. military base, that was still usable because it was struck by the Russians with a very short half-life Neutron Bomb rather than a standard radioactive bomb. After they arrive a soviet plane arrives, mostly with women and children. The scientists who were on Jonah's plane determine that the fallout is arriving from the north and they will have to head for the South Pole. With help from someone on the Telex network, they determine there is enough food for all of the people on both planes to go. A serious mistake requires some of the people on the Russian plane to have to sacrifice themselves by jumping out to allow the rest of them to reach the South Pole. After they arrive it is determined the impact of all the nuclear weapons has caused the planet's poles to shift, and where they are will become a much more pleasant climate.

Note that the bit above is referring to the updated ending of the book. In the original ending, which I found in the library edition I just read (I believe it is first edition), pretty much exactly the above happens. Except, shortly after one scientist tells them of the shifting poles that will cause their new colony to be in a subtropical area, another walks in to announce that the changing winds cause by earth's shifting axis have brought the radioactive fallout to Antarctica, and they are all doomed to a fairly quick death: "Yes, the warm air is coming. Coming from the north. It is here...here now. And it has brought death with it. The air you breathe now is twice the fatal level...and rising fast." The book then ends with a sort of philosophical piece labelled:

   E
   P
   I
PROLOUGE
   O
   U
   G
   E

I'm not sure why the later printings removed this shock ending, but there are definitely two versions of the story. Christopher Parham (talk) 08:10, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm thinking that it's a pretty dreary story as-is. Ending a story as depressing as it was without some "redeeming" quality probably caused people not to buy the book as most people don't like a story that goes from bad to worse to disaster and then gets even worse from there. I know I wouldn't have liked the story. Also, it eliminates any possibility of writing a sequel to the first book. Paul Robinson 18:56, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Additional commentary

In my book Instrument of God, two characters (Supervisor 246 and George) are discussing the book and why one of them disagreed with the plot.

"You're welcome. 246, Anything else?"

"Now I remember. David, repeat what you said to me when I asked you to page George."

"I think I asked you what that was about because the exact same term ["Armada Signal"] was used to indicate World War III and the end of the world in the book Down to a Sunless Sea."

"That is exactly what it is for. That was a great book. Your boss is pretty sharp."

"I thought it was good but I felt the idea for the plot was a bit thin, that Great Britain would hold onto its oil, while the U.S. ran out of all of its and as a result the country collapsed. It showed how the U.S. would look as society disintegrated into the equivalent of a bankrupt third-world country. A well-written book and an excellent plot device, but probably unlikely."

"I thought it was a very plausible scenario, 246, why do you think it was unlikely?"

The U.S. was, when I died, importing more than half its oil anyway. And Japan imports 90% of its oil; neither country has problems buying it. It's something like what Robert Heinlein said once, if the price of hamburger goes from $1.50 a pound to $5.00 a pound overnight, it's an inconvenience. If you can't get hamburger at all, then it's a disaster. If the price of oil goes up, it drives out those who can't afford it and the supply equalizes."

"But what if you had a major dry up in supply, as the story said?"

"Estimates are that Saudi Arabia alone has over 100 years of supply. And we keep finding new ways to get oil out of wells that are marginal. As the supply started to run low — and remember, the system that is used to ship oil has a six-week backlog, it takes six weeks from the time any oil supply is reduced (or increased) — before it shows up, there's time to raise prices and drive out marginal customers who can't afford it. That then encourages opening of wells too expensive to operate at the previous low price. That's why when OPEC severely raised oil prices it eventually caused a glut on the market because it encouraged exploration now that oil was more valuable, it encouraged more oil drilling and uncapping of wells that were more expensive to operate, but were now affordable at the higher price for crude.

"We had gas lines because of government distribution mandates and price controls. When both conditions ceased, even extreme fluctuations in price did not cause shortages because refiners were free to raise (or lower) prices to match competitors and to make money, plus they could distribute fuel where it was needed most, not where government orders said it had to go or what price they could charge.

"If you have a free market in energy, supplies will meet demand. Even the book mentioned attempts to use coal as a substitute although the effort was going to take a long time. It's only when someone tries to put their thumb on the scale and artificially change things that you have a problem, either because someone tries to corner the market - which almost never works - or because the government steps in and either nationalizes the system, which eliminates competitive forces because it becomes politically unacceptable for a government agency to allow prices to rise (or it encourages corruption by allowing the government ministers who operate it to use a lucrative system to line their own pockets which means prices won't fall, either), or the government imposes price controls on private companies, which does the same thing, cuts off supply.

"If the price of something goes up radically, it's usually temporary until the market corrects the problem, if it is possible by new suppliers stepping in, then the price usually comes down and stabilizes. There are almost always other choices. Maybe they'll develop an alcohol type fuel from crops, and something to inexpensively convert gasoline engines to use it. A high price is only an inconvenience, it may mean some people have to do without something else or use less in the interim. It's only if you can't buy oil at all (or the market isn't allowed to correct itself) that it's a real problem. And Desert Storm showed what the U.S. could do to any country that might threaten world oil supplies. Of course, the author couldn't know that at the time, even I didn't expect the world's military to cooperate so much or do that well, and he had to have the U.S. collapse in order to make the story work. That's why I said, it was an excellent plot device and a well-written book but as it was I saw the scenario unlikely."

Paul Robinson (Rfc1394) 00:30, 16 June 2006 (UTC)