Down to a Sunless Sea

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David Graham's Down to a Sunless Sea (1979) is a post-apocalyptic novel about a planeload of people during and after a short nuclear war, set in a near-future world where the USA is critically short of oil. The title of the book is taken from a line of the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

[edit] Plot summary

The story is told in the first person by Jonah Scott, a British pilot for the fictional airline Air Britain who has arrived in New York City on his regular flight from London. The United States has collapsed into the equivalent of a bankrupt third-world and borderline-starving country (1200 calories/day) after using up nearly all of its oil reserves and a resultant collapse of the dollar. The taxi that Jonah and Senior Flight Attendant Kate Monahan take to the airline's NYC apartment is powered by methane generated from chicken droppings.

During the night, Jonah and the apartment superintendent and guard, John Capel, must fight off armed burglars disguised as military police looking for food. Capel is wounded but Kate demonstrates her basic medical skills. Jonah offers to help Capel and a newly-orphaned girlfriend of one of his crew travel illegally to London aboard his aircraft.

Shortly after take off from New York, Jonah is informed that Israel has attacked Beruit, Damascus, and Cairo with nuclear weapons in retaliation for their poisoning of Tel Aviv's water supply. Jonah invokes Air Britain's ARMADA nuclear-attack contingency plan.

Israel's strike triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust while the plane is en route to London, the USSR and China attacking America. Unable to continue to Europe due to the fact that it has suffered nuclear attack, or return to New York, the crew desperately attempt to find a place to land their plane.

Faced with dwindling fuel, and the destruction of the airfield at Funchal by a desperate pilot disobeying landing instructions, Jonah and his crew wonder whether to crash land on an island in the Azores chain with the help of Juan, a local resident who has contacted them via amateur radio. By pure chance, Jonah sights a NATO airfield, Lajes Field, which has certainly been attacked, but which is mostly intact. Jonah and the nuclear scientists who are on board deduce that the Soviets needed Lajes intact and accordingly attacked it with a neutron bomb. After seeing Eddie Burns, a survivor who was deep underground at the time of the attack, Jonah lands the plane at Lajes.

Rising levels of wind-swept fallout from Europe require that they evacuate, and it is decided that they fly to Antarctica. With Eddie's help, Jonah and the SAS soldiers on board manage to re-activate the base radar and use the teletype machines to make contact with a British naval officer in the Falklands who is able to confirm with the McMurdo Antarctic base the existence of sufficient provisions, plus a nuclear reactor for warmth.

A Russian Antonov freighter aircraft lands at Lajes. It is initially mistaken for a Soviet troop transport. It is however carrying two female Soviet Air Force crew and several refugees. Next morning, after both aircraft are refueled, the survivors endure flying through an overcast layer of radioactive ash and byproducts on their way to Antarctica. There are more sacrifices when the Antonov cannot make the necessary altitude with the weight of cargo, passengers, and fuel: even after jettisoning everything, fifty Russian volunteers must sacrifice themselves by jumping from the plane's hatch.

Soon after the characters' arrival at McMurdo it is realised that the tilt of the Earth on its axis has been affected by the numerous nuclear explosions. There are two different endings of Down To A Sunless Sea which suggest either a radioactive death for all the survivors with a theological twist, or, more optimistically, a chance for the almost one thousand survivors to rebuild the world in not just warmth but also peace and cooperation.

[edit] State of the World Before The Nuclear War

• Mexico's leftist government has refused to export oil to capitalist countries;
• Canada has militarized its border and made exporting oil a capital offense;
• Britain has instituted fuel rationing, and had followed a policy of conservation;
• Israel has captured all of Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan in its most recent war;

[edit] State of America Before The Nuclear War

• President Booker T. Langford, the first African-American President, has to deal with an African-American secessionist movement in Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Mississippi and an autonomous urban African-American Muslim brotherhood. He dies in the nuclear war: his successor, James McCracken, becomes acting president in an unknown bunker location.
• There is a resurgence of steam-powered locomotion: single men without dependents 25 and older are drafted to dig coal; men with families may volunteer, while other conscripts are in the National Guard, advised by the SAS.
• Most people left the cities; most of the remainder were those who could survive in the absence of law. Law abiding people traveled in organized quasi-military groups and even the military withdrew from the cities at night.
• Collapse of the criminal justice system; Jonah kills an intruder but Capel simply bags the dead men for collection.
• America tried to trade gold from Fort Knox in exchange for oil but the gold never made it to the Gulf of Mexico because of riots.
• The armed forces has whatever little oil America can still produce. The big planes are practically grounded, but aircraft carriers (Harrier Carriers) still deploy VTOL aircraft.
• After desperation turns to mass starvation and cannibalism, Spain airlifted medicine, Great Britain sent ten supertankers of oil and Brazil sent meat-packing ships.
• The United States has a program of voluntary expatriation for any citizen who has family abroad to support them. However, it is necessary to keep desperate people from storming aircraft; Jonah witnesses a National Guard unit firing on civilians who were charging their line.