Name this book: whales and dolphins talking with humans.

December 13, 2004 5:39 PM

On the "I can't remember what book this was..." kick, I've been trying to find a book from years ago that was so bad that it was phenomenal. It was sci-fi that began with the premise that whales and dolphins could speak human languages. We discovered this when a dolphin being trained for the Russian military finally broke and began speaking to humans as it feared for its life (I think). The book then goes on to silly detail about different cetaceans and how they talk (Blue whales being stupid and inarticulate, orcas talking in something resembling old english saying "Ye of the lande" and such - yes, the extra e was added in on some of those words). The whole thing comes to a head as we attempt to make contact with giant Jovian Space Whales and to do so construct our own gigantic robotic space whale with the brain of a blue whale.

I know this sounds like a crack-trip, but I REALLY want to find this book so that I can give it to a fellow marine ecologist as a gift for christmas. It's the funniest thing EVER.
posted by jearbear to Writing & Language (16 answers total)

sounds like a cross between Treehouse of Horror XI and Star Trek IV...


"snorky... talk!"

*GASP*
posted by quadrinary at 6:18 PM on December 13, 2004

So longeth & we thanketh thou for all thy fish?

I found this:

If you're unfamiliar with the movie, you won't believe it's really about this until you see it. Put simply, it's the story of a man (George C. Scott) who trains dolphins to speak -- English -- and then finds them caught up in a government assassination plot. It's either a grand joke on the scale of Punk'd or a grand disaster on the scale of Ishtar. There's not an ironic line in the film -- and in fact, there's not a terrible lot of lines, as the underwater footage recalls silent Jacques Cousteau-style filmmaking.
posted by ori at 6:49 PM on December 13, 2004

It looks like that movie was based on a book by Robert Merle called "Un Animal doue de raison". He died earlier this year.
posted by ori at 6:53 PM on December 13, 2004

(finally, here's a link to the book itself on alibris: $2.95. Or here it is brand new on Amazon.)
posted by ori at 6:56 PM on December 13, 2004

Is it A Deeper Sea by Alexander Jablokov?
http://www.sff.net/people/Jablokov/books.htm
posted by gnat at 6:56 PM on December 13, 2004

Faaaaa looooove Paaaa!
posted by LairBob at 7:14 PM on December 13, 2004

It's Jablokov. I read the short story "A Deeper Sea" as part of an anthology, and that was the gist of the story. There are also some other books by someone else where the dolphins get pissed after they've been uplifted, but I can't remember who they were by.
posted by SpecialK at 7:25 PM on December 13, 2004

Oo, get out of my head, LairBob! My brother and I went around saying "Faaaa loooove Paaaaaaa!" for a really long time that year, and then forgot about it for twenty years until he snuck up behind me at an aquarium while he and I and his then-stepkids were watching a dolphin show^H^H^educational presentation, and I laughed so hard I fell off the concrete bench into a pool of slime. In white linen capri pants.

jearbear, if you want to give your colleage a book in which a woman marine biologist has a hot sexy affair with a dolphin, Easy Travel to Other Planets by Ted Mooney is the one.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:42 PM on December 13, 2004

SpecialK, there are the David Brin "Uplift" books, where one of them has a really prominent storyline about uplifted cetaceans--they're not generally pissed off, as I recall, but there are good guys and bad guys among the aquatic characters. (I forget which book it is in the series.)

There's also the Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City, where there's a bionic/uplifted dolphin on a space ship that's basically gone insane, and ends up being given the opportunity to torture a human prisoner.
posted by LairBob at 7:59 PM on December 13, 2004

Oh my god, Sidhe ... I remember that book... it's scary how much sci fi I've read. There's another book that has a similar, um, portion ... I think one of the Brin ones, but I really can't remember for sure.
posted by SpecialK at 8:01 PM on December 13, 2004

Yeah, Lairbob, I remember the Brin ones ... but it wasn't one. If I remember correctly, the dolphin was armed with a minesweeping laser and was mostly bionic.
posted by SpecialK at 8:28 PM on December 13, 2004

I can't believe there are so many books about talking bionic dolphins! This is clearly a neglected subgenre.
posted by painquale at 8:40 PM on December 13, 2004

There's always this Cetacean Fiction Bibliography
posted by gnat at 9:13 PM on December 13, 2004

Cripes, painquale, we haven't even covered half the stories that have talking dolphins in them. We've just covered the really weird ones in this thread. If you really want to get into it, Anne McCaffery has written whole books about talking dolphins, and I'm sure that just by going through the very limited library that I have at home you could turn up at least three or four more examples of 'uplifted' or talking or psychic dolphins, or dolphin/human translators.
posted by SpecialK at 10:22 PM on December 13, 2004

He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.

Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.
posted by seanyboy at 5:47 AM on December 14, 2004

Response by poster: It was indeed Jablokov - thanks so much, everyone!
posted by jearbear at 12:29 PM on December 14, 2004