Abduction
Perry Berg is president of Benthic Marine and a passenger aboard The  Benthic Explorer, a 450-foot research ship endeavoring to drill into, and sample  for the first time, the earth's magma core. Also onboard are the lovely Dr.  Suzanne Newell; ex-navy commander and present submersible skipper Donald Fuller;  and navy-cum-Neanderthal divers Richard Adams and Michael Donaghue. It is this  cast of characters who, with the reluctant Perry, dive to the stilled drill site  in order to make repairs. En route, they are sucked (or suckered) into a defunct  undersea volcano and deposited into an otherworldly wonderland. That takes about  75 pages of fairly cogent spadework. The next 375 pages sprout some of the  looniest, most derivative, made-for-TV-movie science fiction imaginable. Our  heroes, you see, have been abducted to Interterra, an undersea world of  staggering beauty and unheard of technologies--intergalactic travel and eternal  life, for starters--populated by stunningly beautiful, toga-wearing, first-generation humans.First-generation? They were here first, see, and had been doing very nicely  until their scientists realized that the earth was about to be "showered with  planetesimal collisions, just as had happened in its primordial state," and that  they had better start digging. While the Interterrans prospered and thrived  undersea, we, the second generation, began hauling our single-celled bodies up  by our ooze-straps and started all over again.And that's about it. People with names like Arak and Sufa speak strangely,  giggle at the primitive second-generationists, recoil at the very thought of  violence, press their palms together to have sex, and direct "worker clones" to  do the dishes while the second generation does its stereotypical best to, in  turns, exemplify, define, and defile humankind.If you've yet to read Robin Cook's innumerable (and mostly successful) medical  thrillers, start now. If you want to read about an alternative world, start off  right with H.G. Wells's 1895 masterpiece,The Time Machine.--Michael  Hudson