Trivial implausibility

Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy’s The Wake (Vertigo, 2013–14) is an engaging and enthralling comic series. Part horror, part post-apocalyptic science fiction, The Wake splits its narrative between the present day, when malevolent aquatic humanoids are discovered in the waters off Alaska, and the 24th century, when those aquatic humanoids, called Mers, have succeeded in raising Earth’s sea level by so much that the continental US has shrunk in size by a quarter and the country’s government and economy have collapsed.

When it comes to verisimilitude, the science in The Wake is a mixed bag. On the plus side, there’s cetologist Lee Archer, the main character of the first half of the series. When we first encounter her in chapter one, she’s tagging whales in Puget Sound. She was expelled from her previous job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for kicking up a fuss about S-Net, a prototype US Navy sonar program that collaterally killed whales. By the end of the chapter, she’s been recruited by Agent Cruz of the Department of Homeland Security to identify the source of a mysterious whale-like sonar signal.

As portrayed in the comic, S-Net resembles a real US Navy sonar system that attracted a lawsuit from the Natural Resources Defense Fund in 2005. NRDC contended that system, which had been implicated in several mass beachings of cetaceans, contravened several environmental laws. The equipment and methods that Archer uses to analyze the mysterious signal also seem true to life.

Less plausible, but not strongly challenging the reader’s suspension of disbelief, is the evolutionary biology behind the Mers. As the panel above shows, Archer offers several more-or-less-reasonable pieces of evidence for how humans—or an evolutionary offshoot of humans—came to spend time adapted to an aquatic environment.

But what I struggled to accept, even in the services of science fiction, was author Snyder’s explanation for how the aquatic humanoids could sink the world’s coastal cities in a day by somehow acting together to create large whirlpools.

Pushing up water to cover an area the size of Manhattan (60 km²) with a layer of water 2 m deep would entail converting kinetic energy into about 60 gigajoules of potential energy. One of the whirlpools depicted in the comic is as wide as the Brooklyn Bridge, whose longest span is about 500 m. The East River, which the bridge crosses, is about 10 m deep. If 6000 Mers acted together on the outside of that volume, they’d each have to expend 10 megajoules to flood Manhattan. If they’re as powerful as horses (1 hp is 746 W), they’d need to work for 9 days, not one. And because of the conservation of angular momentum, the Mers can’t stir up a whirlpool by swimming together in a circle.

Of course, I didn’t do that calculation when I reached the part in The Wake where the Mers flood Manhattan. My initial skepticism was based in part on my intuition that the energy cost would be implausibly high. But the bigger source of my skepticism was the fact that even if the Mers succeeded in flooding coastal cities, the water would drain away in about a week, as it did after Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Even more implausible is the method the Mers use to raise the world’s sea level: by moving warm water from the equator to the poles to melt the ice caps.

Why was I so bothered by the flooding in The Wake? After all, I have no problem accepting faster-than-light travel, self-aware robots, Star Trek–style replicators, and other science fiction staples. Even the Force in Star Wars is palatable—just.

My problem, I think, is that the flooding was trivially implausible rather than interestingly implausible. It wasn’t a matter of technology being stretched to—or beyond—its current, scientifically demarcated limits. The Mers are portrayed as primitive. Causing near-instant climate change by diverting large volumes of water in the open sea with their limbs and fins and without technology is a plot element too far—at least for me.

But don’t let my criticism dissuade you from reading The Wake. Although it has other problems—the denouement is muddled and somewhat anticlimactic—its characters are compelling and its plot, despite my quibbles, sweeping and ambitious. The comic is also stunningly drawn (by Sean Murphy) and beautifully colored (by Matt Hollingsworth). Its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world is far richer and more interesting than the ones found in the films Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Waterworld (1995), or The Postman (1997).