Description:

Amazon.com Review

Perry Berg is president of Benthic Marine and a passenger aboard The Benthic Explorer, a 450-foot research ship endeavoring to drill into, and sample for the first time, the earth's magma core. Also onboard are the lovely Dr. Suzanne Newell; ex-navy commander and present submersible skipper Donald Fuller; and navy-cum-Neanderthal divers Richard Adams and Michael Donaghue. It is this cast of characters who, with the reluctant Perry, dive to the stilled drill site in order to make repairs. En route, they are sucked (or suckered) into a defunct undersea volcano and deposited into an otherworldly wonderland. That takes about 75 pages of fairly cogent spadework. The next 375 pages sprout some of the looniest, most derivative, made-for-TV-movie science fiction imaginable. Our heroes, you see, have been abducted to Interterra, an undersea world of staggering beauty and unheard of technologies--intergalactic travel and eternal life, for starters--populated by stunningly beautiful, toga-wearing, first-generation humans.

First-generation? They were here first, see, and had been doing very nicely until their scientists realized that the earth was about to be "showered with planetesimal collisions, just as had happened in its primordial state," and that they had better start digging. While the Interterrans prospered and thrived undersea, we, the second generation, began hauling our single-celled bodies up by our ooze-straps and started all over again.

And that's about it. People with names like Arak and Sufa speak strangely, giggle at the primitive second-generationists, recoil at the very thought of violence, press their palms together to have sex, and direct "worker clones" to do the dishes while the second generation does its stereotypical best to, in turns, exemplify, define, and defile humankind.

If you've yet to read Robin Cook's innumerable (and mostly successful) medical thrillers, start now. If you want to read about an alternative world, start off right with H.G. Wells's 1895 masterpiece, The Time Machine. --Michael Hudson

From Publishers Weekly

A mountain far beneath the ocean is the setting in this latest work from bestselling author Cook (Coma; Contagion; Vector, etc.). Perry Bergman, founder and president of Benthic Marine, is conducting research in a remote region of the Atlantic. The crew has been trying to drill through an underwater mountain that appears to be filled with some liquid or gas, but they've encountered several mishaps, and Perry has flown out to the ship to assess the problem for himself. He's invited to dive to the seamount with several others in a submersible craftDthe most reliable one, the veteran commander tells Perry, he has ever piloted. Suddenly the small ship seems to lose power and is lured deeper into the water and into the underwater world of Saranta, whose stunning, sexually charged residents, the Interterreans, claim their city is much more beautiful and desirable than the fabled Atlantis. Although the Interterreans treat the humans as their special guests, Perry and his crew are desperate to escape. Cook keeps readers turning the pages with fast-paced action and intriguing details about Saranta; while the action may appeal to his teeming die-hard fans, however, this is not one of his better efforts.
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