Superb world-building. It’s not until page 158 that Clarke expressly states there have been ‘catastrophic political and social changes’. Even then he doesn’t tell us exactly what they are, but by then we’ve pieced it together.

The British have subjugated the planet. It’s ostensibly a democracy, but functionally a bureaucracy. They have control of the world’s food supply. Access to administrative power is controlled on racial lines, so strictly that even though they have the entire planet to draw on they struggle to find enough administrators.

There are now 5 billion people. I think this is supposed to sound like a lot. There would have been about 2.8 billion when the book was published. They have started to farm the sea for whales and plankton. They’ve installed nuclear generators on the sea bed to heat the sea and stimulate plankton production. I can’t even begin to explain how stupid an idea this is.

Clarke appears to be drawing a parallel between the whales and the humans, being fattened for the kill. I’m not surprised he moved abroad about this time. I would particularly recommend this book to vegetarians. ( )

Typically for Clarke, a complex, humane, and wistful novel. Seasoned spaceman Walter Franklin suffers from extreme astrophobia after a space walk gone awry. He’s reassigned to the Bureau of Whales, which manages the world’s oceans (and ranches the world’s whales) in order to feed humankind. The adjustment and reintegration period is somewhat difficult. During his training, after suffering a psychotic break, Franklin attempts suicide (via a doomed excursion in a minisub), but eventually he recovers. His first family stays on Mars, meaning their paths will not cross again, since his children developed in low gravity conditions and cannot return to Earth, while Franklin’s phobia ensures he must remain terrestrially bound: “To his son, he willingly bequeathed the shoreless seas of space. For himself, the oceans of this world were sufficient.” Much of the novel involves the Bureau’s hunt for a giant squid nicknamed Percy, as well as Franklin’s parallel fascination with an ever-elusive ocean cryptid (possibly some kind of sea serpent), which he never manages to capture or even properly confirm. One suspects this hauntological metaphor is central to the text: the beguiling presence/absence of something living, mysterious, and strange, the very irresolution of which in no small way produces and sustains its appeal. Make what you will of the fatal consequences (for Franklin’s closest friend) of searching after this spectral macguffin. At what cost, the hunting of a snark? By the end of his career, Franklin has become Director of the Bureau of Whales, and the novel changes its focus from accommodating oneself to earthly conditions (however ironically displaced in Franklin’s fundamentally thalassic orientation) to interrogating animal rights in relation to humanity’s Gattungswesen. On the one hand, this seemingly abrupt shift reminds one of the theological dialogues about abortion that emerge in the latter part of A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). On the other hand, Clarke’s concern regarding the moral standing of the human species (especially when viewed from the putative outside) is perennial in his work: “Within a century or so, we will literally be going outside the solar system. Sooner or later we will meet types of intelligent life much higher than our own, yet in forms completely alien. And when that time comes, the treatment man receives from his superiors may well depend upon the way he has behaved toward the other creatures of his own world.”

Arthur C. Clarkes' book The Deep Range, from the mid 1950's, is another optimistic science-fiction look at Earth's future. Set about 200 years in the future, Clarke sees a unified Earth, sovereign nations being done away with about a century prior to the time this book is set in. The premise is that hunger has been eliminated by a unified world effort of developing the oceans into "fields" of plankton, nurturing herds of whales (as well as other aquatic species) similar to how land based ranches have nurtured cattle. Whales are the main nutrient used to feed mankind as well as using all their parts (blubber, ground bones, etc.).
Following the protagonist, Walter Franklin, as he switches his career from being an astronaut to a sea warden, we are brought into the future. We follow his training and though his eyes we learn of how and why the oceans/seas have been cultivated. In the first half of the book, he is guided by Don Burley who begins as his instructor becomes his peer and finally a close family friend - Walter's children call him "Uncle". Through their adventures we learn the beauty and hazards of working the seas. As time goes on we see the warm affinity the men feel towards the beautiful whales they care for.
The second half of the book (spoilers) after the death of Don, we follow Walter as he has become a world administrator of the aquatic farms he has cared for over the years. In the second half, we also begin to learn of a push by a world Buddhist leader to lead mankind away from the eating of flesh into vegetarianism. In this section we learn of the darker side of Watler's world. The slaughtering of the sea animals, focusing on the whales.
This is a beautiful and optimistic book that probably won't ever happen in real life.
I am enjoying my sojourn into the past/future as I read Clarke's early writings. There is a gentleness to his writing during his early period.
I highly recommend reading this.
Ok... so I do get a kick out of something I find in books like this. The role of women is nearly non-existent. All the scientists and wardens and astronauts are men. In this book he meets a doctoral candidate, Indra, who he marries. By all accounts of her description, she is a driven and brilliant scientist... but get married and becomes a housewife whose job is to keep a comfortable home, raise the children, and support her husband! LOL ( )

It is very sad that the Ocean (which by words of some number guys takes up 72% of Earth surface) receives so little in the department of sci-fi literature. Yes, many stories includes Ocean as a background or even "ground", many uses it as a scenery, some even try to make it alien life from. But how many takes Ocean as a system "environmenthuman"? I'm not talking about scientific papers or longwinded dreams of "what if?", I'm talking about stories where author actually explores situation when person changes ocean and ocean changes person in return.

There is soooo much literature about space exploration, space wars, space romance, space culture clashes... I would really liked to see more like this in the waves of most dangerous and most mesmerizing thing on earth some people having just a hundred meters from their doors right now. ( )

Tras una terrible experiencia en el espacio exterior, un ingeniero de astronave se encuentra sin motivo para seguir existiendo, pues siente tal pavor por el vacío interplanetario que jamás podrá volver a tripular una nave. Separado permanentemente de su esposa e hijos, que se hallan en Marte, se ve frente a un terrible futuro en la Tierra... a menos que la psiquiatría le ayude a encontrar un nuevo destino en las profundidades del océano.