Deep Fathom James Rollins
Harper 2001World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Dur­ing a total solar eclipse (which is some­how simul­ta­ne­ously vis­i­ble from San Fran­cisco, Alaska, and Guam), mas­sive earth­quakes rock the Ring of Fire that sur­rounds the Pacific. Air Force One, with the Pres­i­dent on board, flees the quakes in Guam only to mys­te­ri­ously crash in the ocean. Among the ships called to the crash site is the Deep Fathom, a deep-sea sal­vage ves­sel owned and oper­ated by ex-Navy SEAL and for­mer astro­naut Jack Kirk­land. Jack and the rest of the Fathom’s crew had been on the verge of sal­vaging a World War II-era Japan­ese ship full of gold bars when the seis­mic activ­ity opened a rift in the sea floor and their prize melted in a pool of magma.

On the sea floor below where Air Force One crashed, jack and his team dis­cover a strange crys­tal spire that bears writ­ing in an unknown lan­guage. They also find that the plane’s wreck­age has some­how been mag­ne­tized.
Mean­while, Cana­dian anthro­pol­o­gist Karen Grace and her com­puter sci­en­tist friend Miyuki Nakano set out to inves­ti­gate two for­merly sub­merged pyramid-like objects off the coast of Oki­nawa, Japan. Upon reach­ing the site, the pair finds that in addi­tion to the pyra­mids, the earth­quakes have raised an entire ancient city above the waves.They inves­ti­gate, find­ing a crys­tal star cov­ered in mys­te­ri­ous sym­bols and get­ting chased by armed thugs. Karen and Miyuki escape with the hlep of Gabriel, Miyki’s AI com­puter assistant.

The pair man­ages to con­nect with Jack and his team when the two groups find that they have found sim­i­lar crys­tal arti­facts with the same type of writ­ing. They dis­cover that the crys­tal has strange light-and-gravity prop­er­ties, and join forces to learn more about the crys­tal and the lost civ­i­liza­tion that carved both the star and the under­wa­ter spire.

Rollins’s story only gets more ridicu­lous from this point. Through the course of the book, we get an entire sunken con­ti­nent, a fight with a giant squid, the out­break of war between China and the United States, the threat of world destruc­tion from solar flares inter­act­ing with the crys­tal, a fail-safe sys­tem involv­ing an inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile, a particle-beam satel­lite weapon that the pro­tag­o­nists eas­ily hack into and con­trol, and a time por­tal. In the end, the heroes man­age to not only dis­pose of their ene­mies and save the world, they actu­ally send the rest of the world back in time to before the eclipse, thus pre­vent­ing all the bad stuff in the book from ever hap­pen­ing. Thus, Rollins has man­aged to write a book that while sim­i­lar in con­tent to some of Clive Cussler’s nov­els, far sur­passes even Cussler’s more recent books in terms of absurdity.

Per­haps what I liked least about the book is Rollins’s inclu­sion of mul­ti­ple pseudo-scientific the­o­ries and dubi­ous archae­o­log­i­cal “dis­cov­er­ies” — the lost con­ti­nent of Mu, the Pyra­mids of Yon­a­guni, etc. He expands on chau­vin­is­tic the­o­ries that the var­i­ous Poly­ne­sian peo­ples couldn’t have pos­si­bly built the mega­lithic struc­tures on Pohn­pei, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Tonga, and else­where in the Pacific. Rather, they must have been built by some ancient lost cul­ture. At least he stops just short of sug­gest­ing alien intervention.

Deep Fathom is cer­tainly meant to be light, escapist fic­tion, but for me it’s just too absurd. I won’t be pick­ing up any of Rollins’s other books any time soon.