The Man Who Lived in Inner Space

by Arnold Federbush

Part Jules Verne, Part Jacques Cousteau; Part Rachel "Imprisoned in a mutilated, almost useless body, the victim of a chemical plant explosion, Colin sought to return to Inner Space - the vast unknown realm of exquisite splendor and monstrous terror that lies beneath the ocean's face. Building himself a sea-house, he journeyed to the depths of the waters, back to the source of life. Drawn by the Siren he went farther, deeper, till the final barrier was transcended - and he and the sea were one...."

Genres: Science Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[TAP · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the sea there is no true death, for life is implicit in death just as death is implicit in life. Each thing lives from the day it dies just as it dies from the day it lives, part of an infinite chain that circles about and comes back to its beginnings.

Crippled by a chemical explosion and disenchanted with the human experience, the suicidal siren song of the sea calls to Colin—a weightless, painless ceasing—a new existence.

A death to pathos and a naturalistic embrace of logos, the inertia of the animal; throw in a euphoric dash of eco-terrorism and this is The Man Who Lived in Inner Space.

Humankind is greed incarnate. We see All as something to conquer, something to own. In the end, we are dead and that ownership is for naught.

We can give it back.

This book is my spirit.

[Sophie Schiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

My father gave me this book when I was in High School and I've held onto it for decades. The book is like a mystical journey by a man named Colin who is growing embittered and cynical as a result of a disfiguring accident. But he could represent any person who is embittered and cynical due to the vagaries of life. His "drug" of choice is the ocean, which drives the story forward. The ocean is a metaphorical drug that keeps pulling Colin deeper and deeper into its vast unknown, places where no human has ever been before. His partner in this journey is a young seal pup who becomes his soulmate, the repository of his anger and frustration. But instead of knowing when to cut the dosage of his dangerous new drug, Colin decides to take a mega-dose until he is finally at one with the sea. But his journey doesn't end there. Read the book to find out what happens to Colin on his mystical journey to the depths of the ocean, and into the chasm of his own being.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a pulpy 70s adventure story as the imprint, cover, and title would suggest. It's an intelligent, strange, and somewhat sensitive story about a crippled man's curious yearning for the sea.

It's written with genuine care, respect and knowledge - at times reminding me of Moby Dick with its reverence for the sea and its occasionally informative nature. Though despite the ecologically sound perspective it still reads like a fantastic adventure story, making the creatures of the sea as mysterious, complex, and bizarre as any alien race, and the protagonist's journey as weird and dramatic as any episode of the Twilight Zone.

A real hidden gem.

[Sol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary:
Colin, a new engineering graduate interested in the creation of a closed, pollution-free manufacturing system, starts his first day at a riverside factory. He is horrifically injured by an explosion on his first day, but survives, disabled, requiring crutches to walk and experiencing constant pain from burns.

Twenty years later, he is the sole employee at the same, now heavily automated, factory, which is also his home. Taking a trip to a dilapidated zoo, he has fantasies of transforming into a lynx, and frees a starving seal pup. He feeds the seal and gives it a large tank of clean water in the factory, but it escapes to the ocean after learning to swim. He goes to a museum to learn about marine mammals, which causes him to recall the poem "The Triumph of Time" by Algernon Swinburne, and fantasizes of returning to the sea.

He begins researching mermaids and sirens, and vividly dreams of them. Hearing a siren song, he sees the seal he saved return to the shore, now fully grown, and the two frolic on the beach. He begins researching the chemical and alchemical properties of water, and constructs a diving suit modelled on the properties of the seal. He suffers a nightmare of drowning, and rejects an attempt by the seal to drag him into the water.

He constructs a submersible base that will use ocean currents as a power source, and takes it to the coast. He calls to the seal, but she does not appear. He discards his crutches, but is unable to close his valves fast enough, nearly drowning. He scrambles to land, and lies by the coast all day. Enclosed by the rising tide and observing the tidal creatures, he enters the water, but begins panicking. The seal appears and takes him to the surface, then teaches him how to swim. Entering his base, he is at first stymied by his buoyancy, then experiences narcosis in the high pressure, but resolves the issues.

While fishing with the seal, he cuts his hand on a lobster shell, alerting a massive tiger shark. It tracks and attempts to eat him, but Colin punches its snout, startling it into leaving. Examining marine snow, he witnesses microscopic plankton predating on each other, increasing in scale until the visible snow is eaten by fish. He accepts the inevitability of killing to survive, and dreams of being eaten and becoming the sea completely.

Going to the sea floor, he observes detritivores eating the fallen snow, and hopes to accept death when it comes. Hunting another lobster, he is attacked by a moray eel, kills it, and the shark steals it. Colin panics and hides in the rocks, the shark attacking before swimming away. He observes that the other fish do not flee the shark, but merely move out of its path, his panic having attracted it. He learns from the sea, eats what the seal eats, and coexists with the shark. He travels to kelp forests, equatorial reefs, and the polar ices, observing life everywhere, but always haunted by the shark. He observes the Marianas trench, and nearly flings himself into it. His mind changes, becoming more attuned to the now, the tides, and the seasons, forgetting human time.

Beset by commercial fishers devastating the sea, he returns to the trench and enters it, the seal refusing to join. As the base descends, it is crushed by the pressure, and Colin escapes to the water, taking only a page of Swinburne and his speargun. He is confronted by a luminescent shark, which takes his spear gun. Beset by the horrifying predators of the abyss, he regrets renouncing the land, and tries to follow his air bubbles upward, only to realize they have been compressed denser than water, and are sinking. He falls into a cave, where he removes his gloves and suit, finding he has adapted to the temperature. As his air runs out, he realizes the pressure is great enough to breathe the scant oxygen in the water, and removes his mask.

He seems to die, but is reborn. He leaves the cave, and hears a song calling him out of the abyss. Rising from the trench, he meets the seal. They return to the places they had travelled, but find them overrun by echinoderms, out of balance and dying. The seal too starts to die, and as Colin discovers oil drilling platforms polluting the sea, she dies. He buries her, and tries to sabotage the drills and factories (including his own), but they are rebuilt faster than he can destroy them. In despair, he nearly allows the shark to eat him, but it refuses, and he is able to create underwater landslides, forming a current which travels the sea, culminating in a wave that destroys the factories.

He lives underwater for some time, until he is accosted by machines, which he no longer recognizes as artificial. One captures him, and he suffocates in the air. The marine biologist who captured him observes a plump, scaled, flippered animal with a vaguely human head. He toys with the idea that he caught a merman, but rejects it. He finds the page of Swinburne preserved under a flap of skin, and imagines the transformation of a man in the depths of the sea. He feels an urge to push the merman overboard, and it is eaten by the shark. The biologist begins to "wonder about a number of things".

A scifi/mystical/mythological tale of a man's transformation in the sea. When I learned the author was a screenwriter who turned to novels in the hopes of a movie adaptation, I began to worry it would be a poorly constructed adaptation from a fundamentally different medium. Thankfully that proved not to be the case. There is some of that interiority expected of the novel, but not explored to the deepest depths. In the hands of William Golding, the subject of this story could have been a truly mindbending journey. As it is, it's merely occasionally haunting. That's disappointing, because it's clear that the "inner space" of the title is as much the depths of the ocean as it is of the human mind. The writing is at it's best when it attempts to merge the scientific, mystical and psychological dimensions of the sea into one. It doesn't quite get there, but it comes so close I can't help but admire it.

The structure certainly seems filmic. There are clearly separated "scenes", which never drag on longer than what would be acceptable on screen. It does give the book constant momentum, so I can't complain. Given that the only characters beyond the first chapter are a man who rarely speaks, and a seal, there's very little dialogue. The descriptions are not ornate, but are vivid and clear enough to evoke what they're trying for.

The distal ends of the story provide the kind of ambiguity I love. In the opening, Colin nearly dies, drowned by his own internal ocean. But, he doesn't. He remains in a state of crippled half-death, until he finds rebirth in the sea. Or is this a repeat of Pincher Martin, with the protagonist dying at the beginning? Certainly a hackneyed device, but the middle of the story is concerned largely with accepting death and its inevitability. His complete and utter detachment from human society (not one human being aside from him appears between the first and final chapter), the way the story proceeds from subject to subject so quickly, like a dream (and dreams too arise again and again in the story), and its increasing detachment from scientific concerns as it goes on all create a growing sense of unreality. By the end, it seems so far beyond believability, I must wonder if it was intended to.

The story continues to unmoor itself from the other end. The creature fished from the sea is never explicitly identified as Colin, and its massive morphological changes seem far beyond what was described in the preceding chapters. The biologist's reverie, where he imagines a man transforming into what he found, matches exactly the journey described over the course of the book. Unless we are meant to understand there is some psychic communication from the dead, it seems plausible that the story is not Colin's hallucination, but the biologist's imagination as he wonders about things that can never be truly known. Colin's attachment to the sea was serendipitous, spurred by saving the seal and nothing else. A marine biologist, on the other hand, would obviously have a deeper connection to the sea than a landbound chemical engineer. From this angle, the strange turns of the story and the deep obsession with the sea, come from its construction by an entirely different mind. The page under Colin's skin provides one wrinkle, but the biologist rationalizes it as a piece of detritus the merman happened to pick up.

Federbush provides a short bibliography of his sources on diving, sea exploration, and abyssal life, as well as three books on mermaids/selkies, Human Animals by Frank Hamel (1969), Sea Enchantress by Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh (1961) and The People of the Sea by David Thomson (1965).

[bex 🌱 · Rating 5 out of 5]

read like man's ode to the sea, very interesting

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been my lunchbox book this past week or so and I just finished it. Just as the blurb describes very Cousteau with some Rachel Carson and Jules Verne thrown in. Starts as a believable real life sort of story and morphs into something that is a bit of a fantasy. Love the geek out descriptions of various oceanic habitats and not bad for 1973. Most of what he wrote is still holding up.

[Andrew Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a re-read. I read it about 45 years ago in my youth and remember being very impressed. Enthralled in fact by the story of a man living under the sea. I was curious as to how I felt about it now. Well, 45 years later I found it a fast-moving enjoyable and informative read. It carries an environmental message and the author delivers this in an interesting way. Perhaps I wasn't quite as enthralled this time round but I am more wizened with age!

[Timelapsed Man · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it, and love it still.

[TMR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and thought provoking interrogation of the literature of solitude and isolation.

[Tyler Lutz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this an extra star only because the synopsis on the back sounded brutal and the artwork on the cover was intriguing. However, the book did not live up to the brutality. The obsession the man has with a seal is disturbing. It was short enough to where I finished it and didn't HATE it...