The novel “The Dragon in the Sea” by Frank Herbert was published for the first time between 1955 and 1956 serialized in the magazine “Astounding” with the title “Under Pressure” and as a book in 1956.
After more than a decade, the war between the Western bloc and the Eastern bloc has led to a scarcity of resources. The West started using specialized nuclear submarines to steal the East’s oil infiltrating into enemy territory to go pick it up directly into the undersea oil fields.
The Eastern bloc successfully started infiltrating enemy agents in submarine crews, made up of four people. The result, together with the danger of their missions, is that twenty submarines have disappeared. John Ramsay is a young psychologist trained as an electronic operator who is assiened as part of a new mission to find the enemy agent and figure out how to prevent others go mad.
In the ’50s, Frank Herbert started writing science fiction. For some years, he wrote short fiction but in 1955 he published his first novel, “The Dragon in the Sea”. It’s set in a not too distant future where a war broke out between the Western and Eastern blocs.
At the time the novel was written, that was far from a remote possibility and the characteristics of the future world are easily recognizable. For these reasons, it’s often not even considered science fiction but is labeled as a psychological thriller.
Certainly, the psychological element is crucial in “The Dragon in the Sea”. It’s a theme addressed by Frank Herbert throughout his career analyzing in many of his stories the behavior of the characters in the face of challenges and problems of various kinds that take them beyond their normal limits.
In the case of “The Dragon in the Sea”, it’s the crew of a nuclear-powered submarine whose mission is to steal oil from one of the fields of the Eastern bloc. After several years of war, the resources have become scarcer and scarcer and in particular they need to steal oil from the enemy.
In the ’50s, oil was an abundant and cheap resource. The fact that it became a key factor in the course of a war was really science fiction. Even then, Frank Herbert had foreseen conflicts over oil, although in a different way from the way they started later.
In “The Dragon in the Sea”, the conflict isn’t meant to take over the oil fields but stealing oil from the enemy has become an important part of it. The mission of the specialized submarine is very risky and the Eastern bloc started infiltrating its agents to sabotage them.
Psychologist John Ramsay must discover the enemy agent on board one of these submarines but must also understand the reactions of the crew to the enormous stress they face during their missions. Each crew consists of four people who are cut off from everything for the duration of the mission. They can only rely on their colleagues so the idea of having an enemy spy on board creates an additional stress.
Frank Herbert analyzes the reactions of the various crew members on everything that happens during their mission. In that situation, the normal rules that apply in the outside world can become flexible. Factors such as solidarity and social control may be based more on factors such as religion than regulations.
In a novel that is short by today’s standards, Frank Herbert focuses on the development of the tension in the submarine’s crew. It’s very high from the start because an attempt to sabotage threatens to derail the mission already at its beginning and reveals the presence of an enemy agent within the crew.
From this point of view, “The Dragon in the Sea” is certainly successful, although Frank Herbert could’ve developed better the individual characteristics of the different crew members. However, the novel is rather dated in some elements, starting with the fact that the submarine is operated using manual controls, with no automation. When the novel was written, nuclear propulsion was the state of the art technology, it’s now normal and for everything else today’s submarines are much more advanced than the ones of the novel.
In some ways, “The Dragon in the Sea” hasn’t aged well but I think that overall it remains a really good novel that shoed Frank Herbert’s talent. If you like a thriller in which the psychological component is important, it’s a novel you have to read.
