HAL CLEMENT – Ocean on Top. Serialized in If Science Fiction, October through December 1967. Daw, paperback, June 1973. Cover art: Jack Gaughan.

   Begun as a perceptive narrative, with no conversation occurring in the first installment of the serial, the story is bogged down from the start, with no sign of human relationships being portrayed. Focused as it is on a separate culture existing at the bottom of the Pacific independently of the rest of the human race, Clement’s tale revolves around four humans, three men and the obligatory woman, who discover these people, but he fails to make any of these natives real.

   The difficulty of existence in this strange environment, even with advanced scientific capabilities, are not gone into far enough, not nearly so. Is the problem too difficult, so impossible, even for an author of Clement’s “hard science” reputation?

   Referring again to the serial ( I have not read the later paperback version which was perhaps expanded from the magazine in which it first appeared), I found myself objecting to learning more about the story from the synopses provided at the beginnings of the last two installments. Granted, there were implications as to the nature of the (Power) Board were present, for example, but why were they spelled out in detail in these synopses?

Rating: ***½