Ray Cummings (1887-1957) was a pioneering American science fiction writer. He enjoyed considerable success in the 1920s and 30s but his career faded after that.
The story takes place in the future - in 1990. This is a world in which few conventional ships remain. Overseas trade and travel is dominated by aircraft and giant submarines. Jeff Grant, the narrator of the story, is second officer on a commercial submarine. Aboard his submarine is 18-year-old Arturo Plantet, the son of a doctor who has retired from medicine to take up oceanography.
Odd things are happening at sea. Several of those remaining surface ships have sunk, for no apparent reason. Then a submarine sinks. The tides seem to be behaving abnormally. At least that’s what is assumed at first but slowly it becomes obvious that sea levels are falling. Falling dramatically.
Then comes a report that a mermaid was seen on an island in Micronesia.
This interests Jeff. From the glassed porthole of a submarine he and Arturo had seen a strange globe-shaped undersea vessel and they had caught a glimpse of a girl aboard that vessel, a girl who struck them as being rather like a mermaid.
Arturo’s father is convinced that civilisation is under threat. He has designed a small advanced submarine capable of operating at extreme depths. He intends to use this vessel to find out what is going on beneath the sea. He needs three crew members. He has selected his son Arturo, Arturo’s sister Polly and Jeff Grant. At the last moment Arturo withdraws from the expedition and sets off for Micronesia in a small aircraft. Arturo intends to find that mermaid. He does find her. She’s not exactly a mermaid but she’s not quite human either. She appears to belong to a species closely related to and very very similar to our own. He calls her Nereid.
Arturo finds out all sorts of other things as well.
A year passes and nothing is heard from Arturo. Then Arturo contacts Jeff. Jeff thinks at first it’s a dream but soon realises it is a form of telepathy.
Jess, Arturo, Nereid and a seaman named Tad (who disappeared a couple of years earlier and had been presumed drowned) then embark on an extraordinary voyage not just to the bottom of the ocean, but to a lost world hundreds of miles beneath the ocean floor. And they will have to try to save human civilisation from an extraordinary threat.
Cummings at his best could create wonderfully strange imaginary worlds. In this case he’s succeeded in creating a fantastic world that rivals Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar.
Jess is a stock-standard hero type but Arturo is more interesting - a dreamy over-imaginative youth who does not at first appear to be the stuff that heroes are made of but he slowly begins to show real presence.
Nereid is also a fairly typical beautiful good girl heroine. Rhana, the Empress of the undersea lost world, is beautiful as well but she’s also evil and cruel.
There are atomic-powered submarines and other technological novelties such as clothing that confers near-invisibility. The scientific (or pseudoscientific) explanations are amusing. There’s a lot of imaginative speculation about the nature of the interior of the Earth.
It’s an exciting enough adventure with some action and with a small heroic band on whom the future of civilisation depends.
It is a lost world story but it’s also a story of a struggle between competing civilisations. It’s very much pulp fiction but thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.
Armchair Fiction have issued this book, in paperback, in their excellent Lost World-Lost Race Classics series.
I’ve reviewed a couple of other Ray Cummings novels - Into the Fourth Dimension and The Girl in the Golden Atom.
Other notable undersea worlds science fiction novels that I’ve reviewed - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep, John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes, Henry Slesar’s The Secret of Marracott Deep.
Sounds good, I'll keep an eye out for it!
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