Into the Deep

This tepid eco-thriller comes as a disappointment after Grimwood's World Fantasy Award-winning Replay (1986). Though the author gives us several interesting characters-journalist Daniel Colter, dolphin researcher Sheila Roberts, tuna-boat captain Antonio Batera-and sketches convincing, often painful pasts for each, such subtleties are blurred by his soft-lensed focus on dolphin characters (with unwieldy names such as Ch*Tril and Ek*Tiq) and their cetacean point of view. The main plot develops in the dolphin sections, which explain that humans and dolphins were once in regular telepathic contact before our violent ways drove away the dolphins, who declared humanity off limits. Now, though, as human depredations in the sea are reaching critical levels, the dolphins have concluded that renewed contact may be the only way to end the slaughter. Colter, Roberts and Batera all felt the telepathic call of the dolphins when they were young, so they're the obvious choices for contact now. The narrative's early stages contain some drama, but it grows increasingly clogged with Grimwood's utopian vision of a dolphin-inspired paradise in which humanity's troubles are washed away by contact with the universally wise and kind cetaceans. The coda describing the eradication of most of the world's ills (AIDS, sexual repression, neurosis, ``an effective end to war, to cruelty, to hunger'') merely confirms this book's devolvement a muddle-headed, moralistic wish-fulfillment fantasy that substitutes airy preaching for real human feeling. (Feb.)