Ken Catran took the plunge and began writing full-time in 1975. At the time, he thought it made as much sense as diving into an empty pool, but he was thirty and had decided it was his decade to be reckless.
After a prosperous beginning with television and film projects as a scriptwriter he decided to begin writing novels. Since 1992 he has released a number of titles. His acclaimed series the Deepwater Trilogy and The Solar Colonies, have been published in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
His books include The Deepwater Trilogy (Deepwater Black, Deepwater Landing, and Deepwater Angels), The Solar Colonies series, Doomfire on Venus, The Ghosts of Triton, Shadow of Phobos, Fire Gods, Ice-stranger, Neo's War, The Onager, Dream-bite and Steel riders. Many of his works have also included the "End of the world by pollusion" theme that was featured in Deepwater Black.
He has also written a screenplay for a movie called Alex about a girl in the 1960 Rome Olympic games.
And it turns out he does have an entry at the IMDb for that, for writing that screenplay.
Thanks to AMJ for the information on the new book.
This trilogy of books is what the series is based on. Its title is derived from the title of the first book in the series, Deepwater Black; the second is Deepwater Landing, and the third Deepwater Angels. All three books are now out of print (except for maybe a few bookstores in Australia or UK), but they were reprinted together in one volume as "Deepwater Black - The Complete Adventure" in 1997, after the series came out. Here is the ordering info for the three previous books and the new one:
|
Deepwater Black
ISBN 0 733 60274 6 |
Deepwater Landing
ISBN 0 733 60276 2 |
Deepwater Angels
ISBN 0 733 60280 0 |
|
Deepwater Black - The Complete Adventure
ISBN 0 340 72705 5 |
AMJ has generously sent me a scan of the cover for Deepwater Black - The Complete Adventure; and I have a scan of the cover for Deepwater Black.
The original publishings of the trilogy can be ordered from the Dymocks Bookstore website. To order, go to their search page, and do an author search on Catran, Ken. Each book is $9.95 Australian, not including shipping and handling, and I'm not sure if they take foreign currency--you may have to convert.
The compilation can be ordered from James Thin Ltd., a bookstore in Scotland, by doing a search from their Name search page. Type Deepwater under the Title Search. The book is 7.99 UK Pounds including shipping and handling [5.99 + 2.00 for s+h], and they also accept credit cards and personal cheques in a number of currencies, including Canadian and US dollars.
James Thin seems to have some extra copies of Deepwater Landing left or something, because it's also available for order there, for 2.99 UK Pounds. The ISBN number for that [ISBN 0340626739] is different, for some reason--it could be that James Thin has the earlier version that was published in 1996 in the UK, since the numbers above are the Australian versions.
Age 14+ Essential reading for the sci-fi-mad teenager and adult, these three novels make up a saga of life on the spaceship Deepwater, and life here is an interesting concept. There are six teenagers in control of the enormous ship travelling the vast circle of the universe. Each character is a clone, formed from genetic material collected millions of years previously and awoken by the on-board computer just in time to fulfil their mission. Their mandate is to repopulate a regenerated Earth, millennia after burning itself out. Deepwater is essentially a Noah's Ark in space; its precious cargo being gene crystals of every species and race to be released at the right time on the reborn planet. However, a successful landing doesn't guarantee anything.
Such a journey couldn't possibly occur without encounters with evil forces attempting to overthrow the mission, and vicious space creatures which object to aliens in their territory.
Each book in the trilogy is narrated by an Earth kid. The others are cloned from genes taken from Mars and Jupiter: Bren has green skin, Lis has blue hair! Rob, Denie and Connal all experience 'prexes', or pre-existences that their clone-ancestors had on twentieth-century Earth, and these sometimes complicate their important work in space.
The ideas and angles available to science-fiction writers are almost as infinite as space itself and this trilogy creates an exciting concoction of scientific theory, fantasy and insights into human, Martian and Jovian nature. Inspired, marvellous work.
--Liz Kemp, Bridgetown HS
As you already may have gathered from that review, these books aren't mere extensions of the TV show--premises are the same, but some fundamental facts are different. Oh, some things are universal--Bren is still hard-as-nails power-hungry and forceful, Zak is still distant, Gret is undeniably sarcastic, and Yuna and Reb run the ship. [There's major spoilage up ahead--you have been warned.] They have a few different jobs, though--for instance, Lise looks out for the alien trites.
Other diffs: Lise is Lis in the book, Yuna is Yoona in the book, and Reb is stuck in his prex [meaning he is still who he was in the prex] and is Robbie the Earthkid for the entire first book. The crew is closer to age 13-14, unlike the show's late-teens approach. Most of the crew is from different quadrants of a terra-formed Mars (but Bren is from Jupiter), and as a result have cool hair and skin pigments [who can argue about black and white when you get red, yellow, green and blue into the picture? =D].
The first book [which, BTW, is the only one I've read] has the crew coming across another Deepwater [a la Reflections except everyone was dead when they got to it, and it blew up]. Throughout the entire book they come up against the strange phenomenons of colour-space--solunks, solid chunks of nothing; jel, which oozes out of the ship every few hours or so threatening to devour the crew's flesh; and trites, an alien species bent on digging their drills through Deepwater's hull and destroying it [and Gret loses her eye because of one; kind of like the space bugs of Infestation--in fact, I think the space bugs were based on them]. The computer, COL, only obeys Reb and Yoona's voice commands, and they are the only ones that can relinquish control to other members. Yoona eventually gives Bren control, and Bren ends up taking over the ship with Zak and locking everyone else off the upper [Command] deck. [shades of Legacy]. Also, rather than waking up fully-knowledgable about the ships' systems and everything, the crew woke up and were "raised" by a different part of the computer known as NUN. Then the crew found their way out early and learned to control the ship and survive.
Then they actually return to Earth and achieve their mission--except that their gene bank is only carrying DNA for the animals of Earth--no human DNA was actually on board their ship. It turns out the other Deepwater was carrying all the human DNA. I'm a bit fuzzy about the end and a lot of the other details in the book, since I didn't get a chance to read it very well, so you might try and ask someone else who's read the book to give you a sum-up of that.
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