Positively, The Swarm doesn't portray disaster from a merely local Eurocentric or Americocentric perspective, shifting to different events across the world (unlike for example the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Admittedly the necessary gung-ho paranoid military types turn out to be Americans, but someone's got to nuke the damn things. In this sense, The Swarm is similar to J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World (1962), but hasn't the depth of human interaction and the latter's characters' quasi-mystical acceptance of the situation. The Swarm is clinical, impersonal, the interactions between people perhaps realistic but certainly not dramatic. The contrary is true of The Drowned World. Amusingly, the Yrr, whose origins are not made transparent might well be surviving remnants of John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes (1953) a.k.a. Out of the Deeps (US), invading aliens who populate and deregulate the seas. Again in Wyndham, there is drama.

At times, Schatzing's prose (or at least that of his translatrix) is somewhat awkward in rendering what are presumbaly German idioms. Whoever's prose it is, it is rather ordinary, with little power to create atmosphere. In one of the earliest tales of animals turning against men, Arthur Machen's land-based novella The Terror (1917), he certainly brings forth scientific facts and hypotheses to support his plot, but its inclusion is seamless and his wonderful prose creates more atmosphere in its 60-odd pages than Schatzing has over 800. Similarly, I recently reread H.F. Heard's short story "The Great Fog" (1944), a tale of ecological disaster induced by an escaped bioengineered fungus. While it preaches somewhat shrilly for a life of simplicity, it is firmly based in the science of its time (it begins with a meteorologist and a botanist's exchange on scientific matters), yet still reads well and creates a good sense of the claustrophobic life inside a constant dense fog. Unlike with Schatzing's work, one could argue that Heard's story is mainly about what occurs after the disaster, but it nonetheless left me much more satisfied than the latter.

While Schatzing has assembled the tropes of disaster novels in a novel and thought provoking manner, and I learned things I didn't know about deep sea-beds, I had a great deal of difficulty in maintaining interest. It is not that there aren't some suspenseful sequences, but these are far outweighed by the rest. This observation of mine may be a result of the fact that I tend to read SF more for entertainment than to expand my scientific knowledge -- that I can do in journals or textbooks. Still, The Swarm's message regarding environmental sustainability, appropriate human stewardship of the sea, and straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back environmental thresholds which if exceeded can induce a cascade of irreversible disastrous events is not entirely a bad thing for today's readers to absorb.