2183

In McHargue’s YA sci-fi novel, a century after an apocalyptic event, a struggling survivor of the catastrophe finds herself conscripted by a high-tech maritime military academy complex.

It’s the year 2183, exactly 100 years after the “Halt” (also called the “Pause”), a disaster in which the planet Earth ceased to rotate. Among the ensuing catastrophes was global flooding, which wiped out most of human civilization. Ing is a teenage girl living in a subsistence-level village populated by scattered survivors. Choosing mates at age 15 is not uncommon now as the human race, with lifespans cut short by environmental hardships and disease, desperately tries to repopulate. But Ing wants to be a “Swimmer,” a member of the male-only order that carries out rituals of burying the community’s dead at sea. Her dying father has trained her in the somewhat taboo art of swimming, and she receives a strange, mystical coin passed down through her family that seems to confirm her destiny as a Swimmer. Ing stumbles onto a seeming impossibility: a high-tech undersea military academy, into which she’s abruptly inducted as a cadet. Ing is trained there “for a lifelong career dedicated to the protection of planet Earth against all enemies, alien or native.” As a surface-dweller, she’s something of an alien herself in the aquatic paramilitary complex, which includes shifty scientists, a quasi-Catholic religious order, a doctor who probably knows more than she’s telling, unsolved disappearances, and, most troublingly, visitations by a gigantic octopus called Calyxar, who may actually be talking to Ing telepathically. Readers primed to expect the umpteenth variation on the standard YA/sci-fi trope of a plucky young hero in a dystopian future triumphing over rigid patriarchy via girl power will be thrown a curve here—the narrative piles on compelling enigmas and builds to a truly cosmic conclusion. Even with a busy plot, an overstuffed cast, and semi-baffling revelations-within-conspiracies, the novel manages to cohere and make sense in the end. The young protagonist discovers sex, though discreetly; the swear words are mostly based on the word flood and its variants.

Complicated intrigues under the sea—no simple beach read.