Behemoth: B-Max and Behemoth: Seppuku by Peter Watts
reviewed by Victoria Strauss
Behemoth opens five years after rifter Lenie Clarke, in an apocalyptic act of vengeance, seeded the deadly microbe Behemoth across a North America already reeling from out-of-control disease and environmental collapse. No living thing has any defense against Behemoth, and the entire biosphere is dying. Elsewhere in the world, governments frantically try to stave off contamination, and wage a losing battle against the destructive cult of the Meltdown Madonna, a dark mythos spawned by Lenie's Typhoid Mary-like odyssey.

Starfish by Peter Watts
reviewed by Donna McMahon
Nobody in their right mind would want to spend a year working in a geothermal power station three THOUSAND feet under the surface of the Pacific, surrounded by pitch black, icy, crushing water, and perched on the edge of the unstable volcanic Juan de Fuca rift. And nobody in their right mind would want to have their lung cut out and replaced with a machine, or have their human genes rewritten as part fish to accommodate this job.

Starfish by Peter Watts
reviewed by Neil Walsh
You want gritty? You'll be spitting grit out from between your teeth after this one. It's dark. It's dirty. It's oppressive. It's a helluva first novel. The omnipotent Grid Authority has established facilities to exploit the dangerously unpredictable geothermal power in the Juan de Fuca Rift at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. And they've bioengineered the crew to be able to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater down there.