White, James The Watch Below

White’s science fiction novel is possibly the most peculiar addition to this bibliography. He sets his story aboard the World War 2 tanker GULF TRADER, with narrative opening in Feb. 1942 as the ship is sailing in an eastbound North Atlantic convoy. Aboard the vessel are her crew as well as 50 or so survivors — including several women WRENs — from convoy vessels that had been sunk earlier in the voyage by Nazi subs. Disaster overtakes the GULF TRADER eventually, and she is sunk by enemy torpedoes just a short sail from the safety of English coastal waters. While most of her passengers and crew make it off the ship, a handful of survivors are trapped in the vessel’s lower deck spaces in an air bubble (think Poseidon Adventure, though the GULF TRADER doesn’t turn turtle like the old POSIEIDON did). Here White’s story veers from reality into science fiction, for he has his survivors settle in (unwillingly, of course) to life underwater in the drifting tanker hulk (it eventually gets stuck underwater on shoals off the coast of Spain). In Swiss Family Robinson style the survivors marry (remember those WRENs?), learn how to supplement their oxygen supply (by growing beans) and maintain their electrical power. Luckily the GULF TRADER is packed with canned goods, so food is initially no problem. Just about the only thing these intrepid folk can’t do is escape their watery domicile. Decades pass with generation after generation of the descendants of the original survivors continuing to live (and die) in the cold, dank wreck. Meanwhile, an exodus of spaceships from a dying water planet are heading towards earth (remember, the key description here is “science fiction”), hoping to colonize the planet’s oceans. How the GULF TRADER’s inhabitants reconcile alien and human culture provides White with an interesting finale. The Watch Below, by the way, isn’t the only piece of World War 2 shipping related science fiction to appear in this bibliography: check out Ray Bradbury’s eerie 1944 short story, “Undersea Guardians.”