My reaction to reading this novel in 1993. Spoilers follow.

I didn’t like this novel version as well as the novella version of the same name.

The dolphins – the best part of this novel and the novella – are just as obnoxious, petty, irritating, and sexually perverted as in the original novella. They, in fact, seem more vicious here (drowning sailors when no one’s around and saving them dramatically when someone is) as do the philosophical orcas. But their motives seemed diffused by the novel’s length. Their religion only comes across has half understood, an unclear motivation for driving whale Clarence on the rocks and for orcas taking an interest in dolphin messiah and God’s Remora Weismuller. Jablokov does a nice job in evoking the phrases of a dolphin language as well as their obsession with hierarchy, sex, and eating. After all, with no oppossable thumbs and no fire, there’s not a lot for them to do. And the idea of a dolphin language that mimics the echoes of real objects is a great idea. The act of echoing, in dolphin mythology, is an act of creating and describing the world.

In fact, this novel can be seen as another example of Jablokov’s concern with the subjects of death, art, and religion. The dolphins and orcas see death as an act that can give meaning to the universe and their lives. Their mythology has God’s echoing as a creative act as well as a description and understanding of the world. The religious Vsevolod Makarygin, son of an Russian Orthodox priest, tells Weissmuller “If shouting the shape of reality is what you should do – then do it. … Echo land …”. Religion is thick in the book – not only with the dolphins but also the pious Makarygin who helps main character Colonel Ilya Stasov find solace and some kind of purpose in their terrible internment by the Japanese in a prisoner of war camp.

The tech in this book is well thought out, but clearly in the background. Jablokov, a communications engineer, is more interested in human relationships and the struggle between Stasov and the dolphins he forces to speak after a self-imposed silence of thousands of years. Both dolphins and Stasov see themselves as using each other for their own ends. Stasov overcomes his guilt at torturing the dolphins into speaking and uses them to realize his vision of a cyborg whale contacting lifeforms on Jupiter.) This vision of his serves a religious function. While the novella has the dolphins trying to flee Earth in cyborg form due to, well, seemingly due to man’s new interest in them on top of man’s old disregard but nothing is totally clear, the novel has the impulse to go into space a religious one, and the orcas want revenge on the enigmatic Jovians that eat Clarence in the deeper sea of Jupiter. They also want to hunt man, Stasov speculates, in space. This uncertainity of motives in this book, their lack of a clear rationale is a weakness though one could read this understanding of motives the object of the lifelong quest of Stasov’s eluded to at novel’s end. Even the reasons for why dolphins stopped speaking to man after the explosion of Thera is not clear.

Jablokov diluted his story in expanding it with the main difference in plot being Stasov on-again-off-again love affair Anna Calderone. His characters' motives seem less clear even though he kept the best part of the novella – the creation of a cetacean consciousness. ( )

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To my surprise this was published in 1992 because it reads like a cold war novel. I was attracted by the lure of first contact with dolphins that had agendas of their own instead of being portrayed as cheerful, playful people who like to recite dirty limericks. Overall I was disappointed, I wanted it to be a science fiction tale and it was more of a morality play.