Blurb:

In the endless war between East and West, oil has become the ultimate prize. Nuclear-powered subtugs brave enemy waters to tap into hidden oil reserves beneath the East's continental shelf. But the last twenty missions have never returned. Have sleeper agents infiltrated the elite submarine service, or are the crews simply cracking under the pressure?

Psychologist John Ramsay has gone undercover aboard a Hell Diver subtug. His mission is to covertly observe the remainder of the four-man crew―and find the traitor among them. Sabotage and suspicion soon plague the mission, as Ramsay discovers that the stress of fighting a war a mile and a half under the ocean exposes every weakness in a man. Hunted relentlessly by the enemy, the four men find themselves isolated in a claustrophobic undersea prison, struggling for survival against the elements . . . and themselves.

A gripping novel by the legendary author of Dune.

“Submarines stalking each other under the sea are like blindfolded adversaries with baseball bats, locked in a room together, each waiting for the other to strike.”

Review:

I mentioned in my review of Amber Benson’s Death’s Daughter my hobbyist interest in what we might call artistic anthropology. How would an actress from Buffy the Vampire Slayer write a fantasy novel? How did the work of Genesis evolve once Phil Collins replaced Peter Gabriel? What can we learn about Elden Ring from the first Armored Core? How did Jan de Bont’s experience as a cinematographer inform his later work as a director? 

Well now I can add a new thread to that tangle of questions: how would the author of Dune write a submarine novel?

There are a great many authors I love, despite having only read one or two of their most popular books; and until reading The Dragon in the Sea (apparently the first of three titles under which this book has been published - a 1961 Avon paperback was published as 21st Century Sub, and a 1974 Ballantine paperback was published as Under Pressure) Frank Herbert was just such an author. I was confident in claiming that Frank Herbert was one of my favorite SF authors, despite having only read Dune (multiple times over); so when I saw his name jump off the spine of a worn paperback in our local Half Price Books, and I saw on the cover that it was seemingly a book about submarine warfare, I snatched it up.

Submarine warfare is the proto-space battle. While much of spacefaring military fiction owes a great deal to classic Age of Sail stories and the ship-to-ship combat contained therein; submarines, unlike traditional sailing ships, can maneuver in three dimensions; and so real life submarines are as close as we fiction writers can get to having a hard sci-fi analog for space combat. So it should come as no surprise then that one of the greats of the SF genre began his literary journey by writing about undersea combat.

I knew absolutely nothing about this book going into it beyond what I’ve just described: Frank Herbert wrote it and it is about submarines. From those two points of knowledge I expected something akin to Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October; but was surprised to discover that The Dragon in the Sea is a wholly different beast. It is not a straightforward political thriller like Red October, but veers much closer to the tense, moment-to-moment survival of something like Ben Bova’s Venus. This is a story about four men trying to accomplish a seemingly impossible mission: not because of the steps needed to complete it, but because the twenty crews that tried to do it before them have failed - doomed by sabotage and by a relentless enemy force.

But with Red October initially in my mind, I also expected this to be a Cold War tale. After all, that’s when the bulk of popular submarine fiction takes place, because that’s when the bulk of real-world submarine encounters occurred (WWII had its fair share but beyond classics like Das Boot the Cold War owns the submarine genre); but this is, as I should have expected knowing Herbert, a science-fiction story. The year of the narrative is not explicitly said, but I believe it must be the late 2020s or early 2030s. It is mentioned that one of the crew had a father who died in 2018, and one has a wife who was Miss Georgia 2021. In The Dragon in the Sea, the world is at war, or at least the hot aftermath of a nuclear war (the United Kingdom has been wiped off the map, and the sea around it dangerously irradiated), between the United States and the hand-wave-ily nonspecific Eastern Powers (which I assumed early in the story to be some Russo-China conglomerate; but it is revealed later that they have listening posts in Norway and Normandy, so perhaps the whole of Europe is involved in this alliance). We learn that the United States has been secretly siphoning crude oil from a rich reservoir deep behind enemy lines, and it is the collection of this oil that serves as the primary thrust of the narrative. 

Our protagonist is Ensign John Ramsey, an officer and electronics specialist from the Bureau of Psychology, tasked with embedding himself within the crew of the Fenian Ram to discover both how the Eastern Powers are tracking down the US subs, and if any of the Ram’s crew are sleeper agents for the EPs. And ideally, helping the crew of the Ram to not become the 21st casualty of the oil siphoning effort. Thus is the stage set for internal and external battle.  

But it is the presence of this book in Herbert’s canon that is more interesting to me than any specific bit of the plot contained within it. I did not realize when I pulled this book from the shelf that it was Herbert’s first proper novel. Published first as pieces in Astounding Magazine in 1955 and then as a whole novel on its own in 1956, the story of The Dragon in the Sea preceded Dune by an entire decade; and yet we see within it the faint impression of all the themes Herbert would explore and weave into his masterwork. 

We see Herbert’s fascination with religion and fanaticism portrayed in the Ram’s Captain Harvey Sparrow, a devout Christian who expends a great many words throughout the voyage praying and citing Scripture. Even the original title of the book is a reference to a passage in the Book of Revelation, “The dragon stood on the shore of the sea… and on each head a blasphemous name.”

And in the closing passages of the book one character even says, “I’m just going to stop posing as a messiah.” I don’t want to speculate that such a simple moment in the story prompted Herbert to begin thinking about the story that would eventually become Dune but…

And John Ramsey too is a kind of proto-Paul Atreides, insofar as he is an outsider to the crew of the Ram and has to prove himself to them, to assuage their doubts about his presence there. He must learn their ways, their customs, their idiosyncrasies - both so he can work with them and also so that he can exploit their weakness (in an effort to weed out which one of them might be a saboteur capable of sending all of them to a water grave).

And the one big motif Herbert keeps circling around in The Dragon in the Sea is the idea of birth. He’s constantly returning to that imagery: the tunnel from which the Ram departs is a birth canal, the crawl space that leads to the Ram’s reactor is a birth canal, the torpedo tubes are birth canals; the ocean is a womb, the submarine is a womb, etc. etc. He’ll often bring up this imagery in the context of safety, or the expectation of safety - the idea of birth as a kind of trauma for the person that is born. In the womb is safety, outside the womb is pain: so the submarine harbor is a womb, the tunnel from it a birth canal, and the undersea battlefield beyond it a world of pain; but conversely, as the crew become attuned to and comfortable within the world of the sub, the sub becomes a womb, the airlock a birth canal, and the shore a world of pain. It’s not particularly subtle. The repetition of the imagery in the book, and the myriad contexts in which Herbert deploys it muddies the thematic waters a bit; but it was his first book, so I’ll graciously extend some degree of understanding that none of us - not even the greats - get everything right the first time. 

So, what else is there? If you’re a fan of Herbert’s other work and are curious about his literary roots, I’d recommend seeking out The Dragon in the Sea. Though one final note: if you want to read this book, I do not recommend the Ballatine paperback (titled Under Pressure - ISBN 0-345-29859-4). There were several phenomenally huge formatting issues (including a line that seemingly began in the middle of a sentence - so really I’ve read all of this book except for the beginning of that once sentence), so I’d recommend seeking out a version that doesn’t play so fast and loose with Herbert’s prose.