Down to a Sunless Sea
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David Graham's Down to a Sunless Sea is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel about a planeload of people during the ultimate worldwide disaster. It explores the issues involved in a world without energy, gone mad, that crosses the line into nuclear holocaust.
[edit] Plot summary
The story is told in the first person singular by Jonah Scott, a British pilot who has arrived in New York City on his regular flight from London. The United States has collapsed into the equivalent of a bankrupt third-world country after using up all of its oil reserves and a resultant collapse of the dollar.
After spending a night in a city which has descended into chaos and anarchy he and his crew ready their airliner to carry a full load of evacuees to London. Shortly after take off from New York City the pilot is informed that Israel has attacked three Arab cities with nuclear weapons in retaliation for their poisoning of Israel's water supply. This triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust while the plane is en route to London. Unable to go on to Europe due to the fallout from the bombs that have just fallen and unable to return to New York the crew desperately attempt to find a place to land their plane carrying what may be some of the last surviving people on Earth.
Faced with dwindling fuel, Jonah and his crew wonder whether to crash land on an island in the Azores island but on passing see an intact NATO airfield, Lajes, which had been neutron bombed. On seeing a survivor the plane lands at Lajes. Faced with rapidly rising levels of radioactivity they decide that they need to evacuate as far south as possible to Antarctica. Not knowing what supplies are available in an American base in the Antarctic Jonah faces the possibility of being only able to evacuate 20 out of the 600 survivors until a survivor in the Falklands is able to confirm with the Antarctic base the existence of sufficient provisions.
Joined at Lajes by a Russian Antonov freighter aircraft carrying surviving villagers from Russia the survivors endure flying through an overcast layer of radioactive ash and byproducts on their way to Antarctica.
After successfully arriving it isn't long before its realised that the tilt of the Earth on its axis has been affected by the numerous nuclear explosions and two different endings of Down To A Sunless Sea suggest either a radioactive death for all the survivors with a theological twist, or, optimistically, a chance for the almost one thousand humans to rebuild the world in not just warmth but also peace and cooperation.
The title of the book is from one of the lines of the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
