#163 Mind of the ocean: The Jonah Kit (1975) by Ian Watson

Back in episode 131, we looked at The Embedding, Ian Watson's startling debut novel published in 1973. Watson was soon to ascend to new heights, winning the BSFA Award for Best Novel for his second effort, 1975's The Jonah Kit. Like his debut, this is a kaleidoscopic, multi-threaded novel set in multiple countries and asking big questions about consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of the universe. What does all of this have to do with the sperm whale?

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Transcript

The nature of the universe is resolved in Earth’s oceans

In Mexico, an egomaniacal astronomer is using a remote radio telescope to question accepted theories about the universe. In Japan, a young boy is handed over to the American embassy, apparently possessing the mind of a missing cosmonaut. Meanwhile in an obscure corner of the Soviet Union, great strides are being made in understanding a unique form of computation. All of these events are somehow linked to one enigmatic species: Physeter macrocephalus, the sperm whale.

Originally published by Gollancz in 1975, The Jonah Kit is the second science fiction novel by British writer Ian Watson. Like his debut The Embedding (1973), this is emphatically a novel of ideas, packed with challenging notions about cosmology, intelligence, communication, belief, and meaning. It is also panoramic in focus, with settings in the mountains of Mexico, Tokyo, Sakhalin Island in the Soviet far east, San Diego, and the ocean depths. It examines the perspectives of a self-obsessed scientist, a US government functionary, and even a young male sperm whale.

Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel, The Jonah Kit is another bracing exploration of ideas by Watson, peopled by deeply flawed characters who struggle, for better or worse, for great truths about the universe.

Shadow of creation

As with The Embedding before it, The Jonah Kit is a kaleidoscopic novel with several initially unconnected narrative strands. 

The single largest thread is set in Mexico, where Paul Hammond and his team have set up a base. Hammond is a Nobel Prize-winning American astronomer whose work focuses on the origins of the universe. He likes to claim that nothing has really mattered since the Big Bang, and yet he is thoroughly self-obsessed. His observations, using a radio telescope in the mountains, cause a sensation when he recklessly announces them. Hammond’s claim is that our universe is merely a shadow, or a reflection, of the real universe. His contention that this proves the existence of god attracts a restless crowd to the base, which simmers with the potential for violence.

On Sakhalin Island, in the far east of the Soviet Union, another group of scientists is gathered. Using an advanced American-made computer which they have obtained on the black market, they are experimenting with imprinting human consciousness onto the brains of sperm whales. A previous experimental subject, a young boy imprinted with the consciousness of a terminally-ill cosmonaut, has gone missing - in a way that may be convenient to Moscow’s aims. The boy turns up in Japan, and is monitored by American embassy staff and their Japanese government liaison. 

With tensions reaching boiling point in Mexico, the narrative threads are drawn together and put humankind on the cusp of a major revelation about the universe.

Communication breakdown

Keith Brooke observed that The Jonah Kit is “a novel about communication”, and in this sense it is an extension of The Embedding. Different modes of communication abound in the novel. The Mezapico people local to Hammond’s base use a form of whistling to communicate over long distances - not unlike the clicking used by sperm whales to keep in touch underwater. Language is a factor, complicating the relations between government functionaries from the United States and Japan. Arguably, it is not so much the implications of Hammond’s theories of “disturbing speculative cosmology” which cause panic, but the way he articulates them. 

Closely connected to the theme of communication is the related theme of cognition. Chapters written from the perspective of a sperm whale are a means of exploring that animal’s radically different view of the world. The various scientific efforts in the novel depend on the limited but rapidly improving computing power of the 1970s, and the Soviet team aims to tap into the collective unconsciousness of cetaceans, based on a theory that biology, and not computer science, can produce the most powerful basis for advanced computations. Around the world, scientists push at their limits, and in its frightening implications the cosmos pushes back.

Action cetaceans

The Jonah Kit forms a part of science fiction’s recurring fascination with cetaceans, rooted in these species’ formidable but unknowable intelligence. The novel in fact opens with one of its chapters using a sperm whale perspective, in order to inject an early dose of cognitive estrangement. The SF focus on cetaceans perhaps reached its peak in the 1980s - Alan Dean Foster’s Cachalot (1980) is a mystery on an ocean world involving communication with whales and dolphins, and David Brin won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel for Startide Rising (1983), in which most of the characters are genetically engineered dolphins.

Watson’s novel explores the unique biology of the sperm whale - the species with the heaviest brain on Earth, five times the mass of a human brain. In The Jonah Kit, it is speculated that the sperm whale has huge cognitive potential, which a human being could tap into and exploit. The novel also mentions the unusual, waxy spermaceti from which the animal takes its name, and its likely uses for both echolocation and control over buoyancy. 

A little knowledge

Keith Brooke described The Jonah Kit as “very fine [...] with big ideas at its centre, but inseparable from a tense and intense characterisation, thriller plotting and clean, good writing.” This is apt. While Watson’s second novel lacks the shock value and sheer intensity of his first, it has a greater subtlety and raises intriguing questions of its own - about what the universe is, whether we can ever be cognitively equipped to understand it, and whether that knowledge would uplift us, or break us.