What do you think?
Rate this book
Fleet
Fleet: The Complete Collection
"The sea is big. The sea is cruel. She takes more than she gives. That's how it's always been."
The world has changed. Coastal cities lie abandoned as the encroaching sea rises, drowning and reshaping the land. Violent plagues, impervious to antibiotics, sweep across the planet, erasing entire communities in a single outbreak. The last refugees take to the sea, fleeing from the chaos in increasingly decrepit ships.
To the people of the Fleet, this is ancient history. There is no room for nostalgia when every day is a fight for survival.
Welcome aboard Miss Amy, an aging shrimp trawler that patrols the Reach hunting for the last few fish in the sea. Her captain, Spat, still believes that the ocean will provide but her young crew is no longer certain. A windfall catch, an animal that hasn't been seen in nearly a century, will send Miss Amy's crew on a journey that will test their faith in themselves and in the Fleet.
Not every secret remains lost in the deep.
Originally published as a four-part serial, Fleet: The Complete Collection brings all four installments, as well as several chapters of bonus material together for the first time.
The world has changed. Coastal cities lie abandoned as the encroaching sea rises, drowning and reshaping the land. Violent plagues, impervious to antibiotics, sweep across the planet, erasing entire communities in a single outbreak. The last refugees take to the sea, fleeing from the chaos in increasingly decrepit ships.
To the people of the Fleet, this is ancient history. There is no room for nostalgia when every day is a fight for survival.
Welcome aboard Miss Amy, an aging shrimp trawler that patrols the Reach hunting for the last few fish in the sea. Her captain, Spat, still believes that the ocean will provide but her young crew is no longer certain. A windfall catch, an animal that hasn't been seen in nearly a century, will send Miss Amy's crew on a journey that will test their faith in themselves and in the Fleet.
Not every secret remains lost in the deep.
Originally published as a four-part serial, Fleet: The Complete Collection brings all four installments, as well as several chapters of bonus material together for the first time.
223 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 20
2 people are currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Andrew D. Thaler
7 books27 followersAndrew D. Thaler is a deep-sea ecologist, conservation biologist, science writer, and occasional science fiction author. His actual scientific writing can be found in the journals BMC Evolutionary Biology, Fungal Ecology, and Marine Policy, among others. He is the founder and senior editor of Southern Fried Science, where most of his popular science writing is found. His science fiction stories are featured in Eno Magazine and, inexplicably, Nature. He lives in California with his wife and a pair of very stubborn goats.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 3, 2016
This review was originally published on Joe Follansbee's blog.
Science fiction’s nautical tradition goes back to the genre’s origins. In 1870, French writer Jules Verne predicted the nuclear submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and he created one of the great megalomaniac characters in literature, Captain Nemo. My own love of sci-fi was sparked in part by the 1960s TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which featured the research vessel Seaview and its resourceful crew. In recent years, however, the ocean has fallen out of fashion as a sci-fi platform. The 1995 Waterworld, the most expensive movie ever made up to that time, killed Hollywood’s interest in the watery parts of the world for years. And few of today’s science fiction writers regard the sea as a place for storytelling.
Andrew D. Thaler’s work Fleet may signal a change. The biologist and science writer has taken an old premise–that Earth’s land is submerged or uninhabitable–put a new set of complex characters on a motley collection of boats, and told them to survive. The action takes place in the 23rd century after the seas have risen and a plague has wiped out most of humanity. Man-made climate change is implicitly blamed for the creation of this dystopia. The boats range from a shrimp trawler to a cruise ship, and they sail the waters of the North Atlantic fishing for the last stocks of edible creatures. Originally published as a four-part series, I read all four parts in a single ebook packaged as Fleet: The Complete Collection.
As an experienced writer and scientist specializing in deep-sea ecology, Thaler knows his subject. His characters appear to be drawn from the men and women he’s come to know in his work with fisherfolk. The details of the boats and their operation are convincing, and the dialog is first rate. The structure of the novel is confusing at times, and the suggestion that a wooden sailboat might survive more than a century in salt water is far-fetched. But Thaler deserves credit for picking up science fiction’s nautical thread, and showing that the oceans still have many lessons to teach landlubbers.
Science fiction’s nautical tradition goes back to the genre’s origins. In 1870, French writer Jules Verne predicted the nuclear submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and he created one of the great megalomaniac characters in literature, Captain Nemo. My own love of sci-fi was sparked in part by the 1960s TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which featured the research vessel Seaview and its resourceful crew. In recent years, however, the ocean has fallen out of fashion as a sci-fi platform. The 1995 Waterworld, the most expensive movie ever made up to that time, killed Hollywood’s interest in the watery parts of the world for years. And few of today’s science fiction writers regard the sea as a place for storytelling.
Andrew D. Thaler’s work Fleet may signal a change. The biologist and science writer has taken an old premise–that Earth’s land is submerged or uninhabitable–put a new set of complex characters on a motley collection of boats, and told them to survive. The action takes place in the 23rd century after the seas have risen and a plague has wiped out most of humanity. Man-made climate change is implicitly blamed for the creation of this dystopia. The boats range from a shrimp trawler to a cruise ship, and they sail the waters of the North Atlantic fishing for the last stocks of edible creatures. Originally published as a four-part series, I read all four parts in a single ebook packaged as Fleet: The Complete Collection.
As an experienced writer and scientist specializing in deep-sea ecology, Thaler knows his subject. His characters appear to be drawn from the men and women he’s come to know in his work with fisherfolk. The details of the boats and their operation are convincing, and the dialog is first rate. The structure of the novel is confusing at times, and the suggestion that a wooden sailboat might survive more than a century in salt water is far-fetched. But Thaler deserves credit for picking up science fiction’s nautical thread, and showing that the oceans still have many lessons to teach landlubbers.
August 24, 2015
This book is set in the distant future, a world where humans have abandoned land and live in small fleets of boats. This is a fantastic marine scifi book, a genre that is severely lacking. Everyone always scifi's into space, where this novel examines the world from a distopian future where humans struggle to survive in an open, broken sea.
I enjoyed the pace of the story, things built up and then raced through a flurry of activity to a satisfying conclusion. There were some moments that were truly uncomfortable, death and despair abounded, and I ached for Spat, Salmon, Croaker and Snapper. Salmon shows the most growth and I enjoyed watching her grow. There were some minor typos in the book, a few missing words, and while Dr. Thaler did a nice job with his descriptive writing, I wish he had spent a little more time on this aspect.
The science that went into the creation of this world was fantastic. I particularly liked the Atlantic Plastivore as it sounds exactly like something we would do today that could have disastrous consequences.
I see there is a prequel, which intrigues me as I would love to know how the world was destroyed. But I really hope for a sequel, I'd like to know what happens to Salmon and her ragtag band of sailors.
I enjoyed the pace of the story, things built up and then raced through a flurry of activity to a satisfying conclusion. There were some moments that were truly uncomfortable, death and despair abounded, and I ached for Spat, Salmon, Croaker and Snapper. Salmon shows the most growth and I enjoyed watching her grow. There were some minor typos in the book, a few missing words, and while Dr. Thaler did a nice job with his descriptive writing, I wish he had spent a little more time on this aspect.
The science that went into the creation of this world was fantastic. I particularly liked the Atlantic Plastivore as it sounds exactly like something we would do today that could have disastrous consequences.
I see there is a prequel, which intrigues me as I would love to know how the world was destroyed. But I really hope for a sequel, I'd like to know what happens to Salmon and her ragtag band of sailors.
May 4, 2016
I blew through this trilogy in a few days. I really enjoyed the first book in the trilogy. The detailed descriptions of life on a fishing boat were very satisfying, and I love me a good post-apocalyptic yarn. The writing definitely shows the signs of having been written in a hurry, but I'm willing to ignore that for an interesting premise and plot. But then books two and three got more gruesome and depressing than I find enjoyable to read, so by the end I just skimmed over the last few chapters.
April 19, 2017
The first few pages of “Lords of the Sands of Time” by Issui Ogawa (whose felicitously lyrical name, 小川 一水, means “little river” (Ogawa, 小川) “current [of] water” (Issui, 一水)) opens in prehistoric Japan, where a queen–shamaness figure like legendary Himiko surveys the kingdom she has cobbled together out of neighboring villages, from the vantage of a mountaintop overlooking the sea. It is a powerful image to this reader, who has long left the ocean, who only rarely sees a mountain, and who is embedded in a continent-spanning nation.
Not least because of this idea of water. Of boats. Of people connecting over water with boats.
In his “In an Antique Land”, Amitav Ghosh recounts a story more improbable than fiction would allow, a story of people in Cairo, Aden, and the Malabar connected by boats over the ocean.
Human networks spanning oceans have different patterns, or at least different textures, than land-based ones. I recently became desperate to try and sound the depths of my ignorance about even the fundamentals of nautical life, ancient or modern, so I started searching for “fictitious vessels”, then “nautical literature”, and then most boldly “nautical science fiction”.
And the internet brought me to Andrew Thaler’s blog, where he notes, “One thing I’ve discovered by publishing my first work of nautical science fiction is that the field is incredibly small.”
Why is that? Is it because of the paucity of writers with nautical backgrounds? Perhaps, but there are relatively few writers with real soldiering in their background yet we have no shortage of novels set in wartime. (I can recall two novels written by actual soldiers, both of which I loved—Joe Haldeman’s “Forever War” and Glen Cook’s Black Company novels.) I suspect it’s because the conventions of war in fiction (and alas non-fiction) have congealed in our society so any kook with Wikipedia can write a “convincing” war story, unreadable by anyone with any experience of that life. So maybe it is fortunate that our literary society hasn’t found some Frankenstein-set of myths and conventions for “sailing stories” and that we are left with a few actual mariners writing stories from their deep experience and wisdom.
“Fleet” transparently shows Thaler’s understanding of the ocean. That’s “understanding”, not “love” though there’s some of that too. I came away with a strong appreciation for the unique ways that the sea makes life hard for those who must live on it. Much of the boaty jargon went over my head—I would have stopped regularly to consult the internet and alleviate my ignorance were the story not inexorably gripping.
And terrible in its details. The story helped me recognize two kinds of isolation. There’s the isolation of the Mongolian horse nomads, with their flocks of sheep and goat and team of camels and horses—a family might go for weeks without seeing another family, and a lifetime without seeing anyone outside that family, but they know there is a wide, wide world out there. Even a thousand years ago, the ancestors of Genghis Khan knew well of settled peoples’ wealth, available to them through trade or raid.
The kind of isolation in “Fleet” is a much more horrible kind, one that one usually finds in speculative fiction, and only rarely outside heartbreaking newspaper stories. Not knowing where another human is outside one’s fleet of a few dozen people. Not knowing… so much. This vision that Thaler gives, of a world inundated with water, of oceans poisoned by man, of loss and memory, is most frightening.
I for one am calling my congressman to demand that the US remain committed to the Paris Agreement—its flaws should be overcome through more work, not through abandonment.
Not least because of this idea of water. Of boats. Of people connecting over water with boats.
In his “In an Antique Land”, Amitav Ghosh recounts a story more improbable than fiction would allow, a story of people in Cairo, Aden, and the Malabar connected by boats over the ocean.
Human networks spanning oceans have different patterns, or at least different textures, than land-based ones. I recently became desperate to try and sound the depths of my ignorance about even the fundamentals of nautical life, ancient or modern, so I started searching for “fictitious vessels”, then “nautical literature”, and then most boldly “nautical science fiction”.
And the internet brought me to Andrew Thaler’s blog, where he notes, “One thing I’ve discovered by publishing my first work of nautical science fiction is that the field is incredibly small.”
Why is that? Is it because of the paucity of writers with nautical backgrounds? Perhaps, but there are relatively few writers with real soldiering in their background yet we have no shortage of novels set in wartime. (I can recall two novels written by actual soldiers, both of which I loved—Joe Haldeman’s “Forever War” and Glen Cook’s Black Company novels.) I suspect it’s because the conventions of war in fiction (and alas non-fiction) have congealed in our society so any kook with Wikipedia can write a “convincing” war story, unreadable by anyone with any experience of that life. So maybe it is fortunate that our literary society hasn’t found some Frankenstein-set of myths and conventions for “sailing stories” and that we are left with a few actual mariners writing stories from their deep experience and wisdom.
“Fleet” transparently shows Thaler’s understanding of the ocean. That’s “understanding”, not “love” though there’s some of that too. I came away with a strong appreciation for the unique ways that the sea makes life hard for those who must live on it. Much of the boaty jargon went over my head—I would have stopped regularly to consult the internet and alleviate my ignorance were the story not inexorably gripping.
And terrible in its details. The story helped me recognize two kinds of isolation. There’s the isolation of the Mongolian horse nomads, with their flocks of sheep and goat and team of camels and horses—a family might go for weeks without seeing another family, and a lifetime without seeing anyone outside that family, but they know there is a wide, wide world out there. Even a thousand years ago, the ancestors of Genghis Khan knew well of settled peoples’ wealth, available to them through trade or raid.
The kind of isolation in “Fleet” is a much more horrible kind, one that one usually finds in speculative fiction, and only rarely outside heartbreaking newspaper stories. Not knowing where another human is outside one’s fleet of a few dozen people. Not knowing… so much. This vision that Thaler gives, of a world inundated with water, of oceans poisoned by man, of loss and memory, is most frightening.
I for one am calling my congressman to demand that the US remain committed to the Paris Agreement—its flaws should be overcome through more work, not through abandonment.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews