THREE MILES DOWN

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

In 1968, a Soviet submarine sank in the North Pacific. Six years later, the United States had managed to pinpoint the submarine's location and launched Project Azorian, which used a ship owned by Howard Hughes, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, to attempt to retrieve the submarine, claiming that they were mining for manganese modules on the ocean floor. The recovery was only partly successful and the truth of the operation was revealed in early 1975. This expedition wasn't quite enough for Harry Turtledove, who has used it as the basis for his alternate history Three Miles Down.

Jerry Stieglitz has been hired by the CIA ostensibly to add to the mission's cover by recording whalesong as part of his graduate degree. Although it means postponing his wedding, Jerry decided the money was too good to turn down, especially when the CIA offering to pay all of his wedding expenses in addition to his salary for the undetermined time he would be at sea. It is only after he's at sea that he learned that the real reason he was chosen by the CIA was because he had also published a few science fiction stories and they wanted to pick his brain because of an indication that the attempted recovery of the Soviet submarine might result in a first contact situation.

The novel follows the attempts by the Glomar Explorer to recover the spacecraft they believe sank the Soviet sub. During much of that time, Jerry is puttering around the ship with others who were brought onboard without knowing the full story and trying to get up to speed. Eventually, he is called upon to exercise his imagination and opinion to try to gain entry to the alien craft and, once he is shown it is possible, is summarily dismissed back to Los Angeles to get married and live his life while keeping his adventure a secret.

Much of Three Miles Down reads like a secret history. The events of the novel would not change the world we know if they had happened the way Turtledove relates them. However, events subsequent to Jerry's dismissal from the project cause the world's knowledge of the Glomar Explorer's mission to go in a different way, with the Soviet Union making a more public response to the recovery than they did in real life. The result is a world seen from Jerry's point of view where the United States is showing its ugly side and the Soviet Union could turn out to be the world, and Jerry's savior.

Jerry's slight career as a science fiction author, which is encouraged by the CIA during his time on the Glomar Explorer and after, although he must send all of his stories to a post office box in Schenectady (in a science fictional in-joke) before submitting them to editors, gives the novel a bit of a wish-fulfillment aspect. It, along with a cameo by a well-known science fiction author late in the novel, cries out to the reader that science fiction is more than escapist fiction, but teaches readers (and authors) to view the world in a different way that can help solve problems, even if they one Jerry uses this capability on in Three Miles Down is more far fetched than most.

While Three Miles Down exhibits the same rigor Turtledove applies to his other alternate history novels, the stakes in this one, focusing on the recovery of the sunken submarine and the discovery of an alien race, as well as the more personal stakes for Jerry, give the novel a very different feel from Turtledove's multi-viewpoint alternate history novels that proposae different military outcomes. Even as Jerry tries to figure out how to protect himself from potential retribution from his own government for real or perceived threats, the novel feels more light-hearted, even if Jerry's personal predicament is just as dangerous as the situations for characters in other books.

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