The Swarm: A Novel
The Swarm: A Novel book cover

The Swarm: A Novel

Hardcover – May 23, 2006

by
Price
$21.73
Format
Hardcover
Pages
896
Publisher
William Morrow
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0060813260
Dimensions
6 x 1.9 x 9 inches
Weight
3.05 pounds

Description

“... a mind-bending, Crichton-esque fate-of-the-planet thriller ... enormously entertaining ... I recommend you dive right in.” — Fangoria “An effervescent cocktail of adventure.” — Der Spiegel “A gripping thriller starring nature unleashed. A monster of science-fiction, rich in facts.” — Stern “The world could collapse around you [while reading The Swarm], and you wouldn’t notice.” — Die Welt “After these 1,000 breathtaking pages you see the sea with different eyes.” — Focus “A gripping novel with fast-paced action, interesting and believable characters ... Enthralling. I was engrossed and on tenterhooks throughout.” — Peter Constantine, award-winning translator of Thomas Mann's Six Early Stories “The outside world could disintegrate and the reader wouldn’t notice because of the spellbinding power of ... Frank Schatzing’s apocalyptic thriller. — Die Tageszeitung “With The Swarm, Frank Schatzing lifts the German suspense novel up to the international level.” — Süddeutsche Zeitung “Whoever read[s] Frank Schatzing’s novel will be thankful for every inch of dry land and will certainly avoid waterbeds.” — Die Zeit “With The Swarm, Frank Schatzing competes with the likes of Michael Crichton.” — Brigitte “At once intellectual and intoxicating, this novel is alarming, unnerving, and overwhelming in every respect.” — Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger “It’s doubtful you’ll ever come up for air ... this ultimate summer read that recalls the best of Crichton and King.” — Contra Costa Times For more than two years, one book has taken over Germany's hardcover and paperback bestseller lists, reaching number one in Der Spiegel and setting off a frenzy in bookstores: The Swarm. Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic, eyeless crabs poison Long Island's water supply. The North Sea shelf collapses, killing thousands in Europe. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the effects of the ocean's revenge as the seas and their inhabi-tants begin a violent revolution against mankind. In this riveting novel, full of twists, turns, and cliffhangers, a team of scientists discovers a strange, intelligent life force called the Yrr that takes form in marine animals, using them to wreak havoc on humanity for our ecological abuses. Soon a struggle between good and evil is in full swing, with both human and suboceanic forces battling for control of the waters. At stake is the survival of the Earth's fragile ecology -- and ultimately, the survival of the human race itself. The apocalyptic catastrophes of The Day After Tomorrow meet the watery menace of The Abyss in this gripping, scientifically realistic, and utterly imaginative thriller. With 1.5 million copies sold in Germany -- where it has been on the bestseller list without fail since its debut -- and the author's skillfully executed blend of compelling story, vivid characters, and eerie locales, Frank Schatzing's The Swarm will keep you in tense anticipation until the last suspenseful page is turned. Frank Schatzing is the author of the international bestseller The Swarm . A winner of the Köln Literatur Prize, the Corine Award, and the German Science Fiction Award, Schatzing lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • Now a CW Original Series
  • The Der Spiegel number #1 blockbuster bestseller about an intelligent life force that takes over the oceans and exacts revenge on mankind!
  • Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic eyeless crabs poison Long Island’s water supply. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the effects of the ocean’s revenge. In this riveting novel, full of twists, turns, and cliffhangers, a team of scientists discovers a strange, intelligent life force called the Yrr that takes form in marine animals in order to wreak havoc on man for his abuses.
  • The Day After Tomorrow
  • meets
  • The Abyss
  • in his gripping, scientifically realist, utterly imaginative thriller. With the compellingly creepy and vivid skill of this author to evoke story, character, and place, Frank Schatzing’s book are certain to find a home with fans of Michael Crichton.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(391)
★★★★
25%
(326)
★★★
15%
(195)
★★
7%
(91)
★
23%
(299)

Most Helpful Reviews

✓ Verified Purchase

Best book I read in 2006 and, so far, best in 2007

Yeah, guess what, I just reread it. Actually, I gave my copy away and had my daughter send her English copy over to me for a re-read. I was absolutely floored by this book, which is so good I read all eight hundred and something pages both times in four days. There is just so much interesting information in here that it can be read over and over. It's kind of like watching the best bits of the National Geographic channel with no commercials. It is absolutely mesmerizing.

What its about. I don't think any other reviewer actually mentioned this. What the book is about is a superior intelligence existing since time immemorial on earth...a sort of hive mind consisting of microbes and inhabiting the oceans and seas. It is everywhere, knows everything and forgets nothing. And humans have become a plague polluting its environment. And it decides to fight back and get rid of this thing. So the book is about the discovery of this entity and(well, of course, politics rears its ugly head) how to contact it and what to do about all the damage it is causing to humans.

There is so much interesting information in this book that it becomes an obsessive read. As well, the main characters are very well developed, not just card board figures functioning in the midst of a lot of scientific jargon.

Yes, this is an eco-thriller, I guess, but so packed with information that I, at least, couldn't put it down through two readings. And, it asks quite a few philosophical questions about humans and their place on this planet and in the universe. I recommend this book absolutely. As a reader who reads three or four books a week, running into something like this is stupendous. Books like this, filled with such a wealth of information and so many intense ideas are very rare indeed.
32 people found this helpful
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Entertaining and thought provoking

Frank Schaetzing's "Der Schwarm" has been so immensely popular in Europe because it combines technological (science) fiction with characters who think (and don't constantly just act) and thought provoking passages between the action pages. If you forgive me this comparison, this novel is not for the fast food pizza consumer, but a delicate feast that requires deliberate tasting and chewing.

I was disappointed, yet not suprised by some reviews that complain about volume, style and scarcity of heavy action. Sorry my friends, this ain't AVP or StarWars. I recommend this novel only for the ones amoung you who still like to use the brain they have. You'll love it.
31 people found this helpful
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Very good book.

I really enjoyed reading The Swarm. It kept me engrossed from start to finish with only one or two slow bits that I still found interesting. The characters are very well written so you can get into their heads. I thought there was plenty of action interspersed throughout the story, but the non-action was just as good. Excellent explanation of the problem at hand and how it was discovered etc.

I will admit this book is quite preachy and bashes America a little bit. Mostly though it slams all of the non-3rd world countries and their populations for what they (we) have done to the planet. However, while I'm sure the author was getting a point across with this, the book is a work of fiction (science fiction at that). He succeeds in making it sound plausible for our destruction to be carried out by our own actions. He obviously writes the president to be George Jr. and writes it like a cartoon version which I can't really object to as the real Bush is a joke.

I'm not personally a tree hugger and am a proud American. I also was not offended by this book in the least. Maybe it hit too close to home for some of the negative reviewers. I would recommend it to anyone.
26 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

FDF pretty well nails this, don't hate on him so much just because he is right.

I think the reviews already written, frankly, pretty well cover this book. (Hmmm, not much of an advertisement to read my review, then. ooops).

If you are a serious tree-hugger, especially a non-American one (or wish you were non-American), and especially one with a lot of free time on your hands, this may be your "cup of tea" (to get right into the British-speak of the book). If not, then this is a 2 star (at best) book. I'm torn between 2 and 1 star, but since it took 800 pages (rather than, say, 400) to be this poor, I'll go with 1 star. Extra penalty for length.

Of all the 800 page books I've read, this is certainly the most recent. ;-). I've read several excellent ones, page-turners to be sure. This is emphatically not. I found myself constantly reading about 5 pages, then getting up to do something else. (Isn't there a stove that needs scraping, or something?) As others have said, this book seriously needs an editor. Or a better one. I skimmed about 50 pages of navel-gazing by the "Eskimo" (-ish) character in total. And and skimmed the 2nd thru 10th time that we learned that offshore drilling is bad, bad, bad.

Certainly true (tho apparently rude to say so) that the European characters are noble, benevolent, in touch with all nature, etc. The US characters are, almost without exception, evil CIA-types, evil political-types, or evil military-types. All very arch by the end. Kinda funny, really. But not a good read.

The action is muddled, with a lot of almost random, frantic activity at the (unsatisfying) climax.

And, also as others seem to have pointed out, the book was translated into "British". Tons of extra vowels (colour, flavour, "ae" where "e" would do), "s" and "z" constantly flipped, etc. Ok, so it gives it "color". (Sorry, colour). But the actual typos and, more importantly, the (seeming) attempts at American idiom that are not at all accurate serve to remove you from your fragile grip on storytelling and jar you back to "what am I reading?" The annoying practice (sorry, practise) of starting all quoted characters with *single* quotes is a particularly aggravating convention.

Yet another reviewer mentioned that it had been a long 2 weeks, and he would have rather read 2 other (good) books in the same timespan. I couldn't agree more. I bought this as a "Jurassic Park" techno-thriller, of some kind of experiment (or natural disaster, like a comet approching the Earth) gone terribly terribly wrong, and there was just enough of that on the cover-flap and back to cause me to buy it.

The result, however, was fairly disappointing.
21 people found this helpful
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An Eco-Apocalypse that makes you think

This Eco-thriller about nature striking back against mankind in the form of oceanic creatures that start becoming agressive, setting off chain reactions under the sea beyond imagination, is one of my all-time favorites. I can't comment about the English translation, but the German original is spellbinding, disturbing and possesses an amazing degree of verisimilitude that is rare for something that could be called Science Fiction.

I have stayed up late at night during stressful work weeks to read this book which never feels long. I have also recommended it to multiple friends of all age groups and all have loved it.

A must read!!!
15 people found this helpful
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A long-winded disappointment

It all starts innocently enough: some missing fishermen, some whales acting strange, some strange worms found in the bottom of the ocean. Of course, things start getting serious, when these aquatic troubles spread around the globe and problems get bigger and bigger. Eventually the survival of the whole human race is threatened.

The premise of this book sounds quite exciting. The problem is, the author has spread all the excitement over 911 pages (at least in the Finnish edition), and there's at least 300 pages too much. He spends some time on his main characters, and I didn't care about a single one of them. There's endless lecturing and preaching. I'm sure a skilled script editor will make a really great movie of this book, but as it is now, there's so much dead weight it took some real effort to make it to the end.

I made it, though, and found the ending ultimately disappointing. I mean, was that why I went through the 900 pages? The book was interesting enough to keep me reading, but in the end, felt like a disappointment. If you can read Finnish, Risto Isomäki's Sarasvatin hiekkaa has a similar theme, but is much superior (at least three times better, with just one third of the pages!). (Review based on the Finnish translation.)
11 people found this helpful
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Interesting ideas, if only someone else had written it.

After two long weeks, I finally finished this 800+ behemoth and I wish that I had read two other books during that time period instead. I've read the other reviews and I really didn't experience many problems with the translation from German to English. I did, however, have trouble with the flow of the novel. I usually read before bed time and a good book can keep me up late into the night. Every time I started to read this one, the next thing I knew my wife was waking me up telling it was time to go to work. This book really could have been written in about 200 pages without losing anything.

Here is how the novel went: 20 pages of action, 100 pages of lengthy philosophical discussions, 20 pages of action, 100 pages of a boring side tangents on some character's life, 20 pages to then kill this character making you wonder why bother to have him/her in the novel anyway, 100 pages of describing the deep sea alien (which could have been summed up in 20) , and finally 70 pages of action with no real purpose and then 40 pages of an anticlimactic ending that makes you scratch your head and wonder what the point of the novel was.

I did finish the novel. At the end it was more a task than a pleasurable reading experience because I felt I had invested too much time in the novel not to finish it. The author had some interesting ideas, the deep sea alien was pretty cool and how it attacks was different. He might have been better off taking his ideas to someone who knows how to write and letting them build the story.
11 people found this helpful
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When water is humanities enemy where do you go?

I'm not generally a fan of 800 page novels as they tend to be rather bloated. However, this is like reading a trilogy in one book in mixed end-of-the-world, alien eco-thriller.

The end of the world starts slow. Most people don't even notice it except for a few scientists who have to be very cautious about speeking too loud because of the vested interests of their employers and the money "scare-mongering" could cost them.

I found this a thoughtful and well researched novel. It certinally had some ideas fleshed out that I've never seen in SciFi novels (and I've read a lot of those!) While some of the science may be shaky in parts, overall its convincing.

For me this book only slowed down in the last few chapters when we moved out of the science sections and into the action-adventure. Some of these latter actions may not go over too well with American readers, but then again not too many of the human governments come out of this well.

This is a massive tome, but worth reading and thinking about, and does a better job with environmental problems and alien intelligence than I've seen in a lot of other books with some of the same themes.
11 people found this helpful
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Great story

A German friend recommended it and after getting half-way through, I will say it holds my interest and is pretty fascinating, with enough credibility and backup of knowledge that is impressive. A good read but lengthy; be patient getting into the meat of it.
8 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

A good read a bit bloated,preachy and inconsistent.

At 880 pages it feels somehow bloated, I bought this book and I usually buy some sci-fi for outlandish premises with enough credibility to pull me into another world for a couple of hours.

In The Swarm the sea turns angry against humans and tries to destroy earth as we know it. What makes it a good read is finding out the details of this; even the mayor twists are interesting.

I personally didn't like the religious tones, as well as the little personal stories happening every now and then, as for sci-fi it makes sense, but not as a drama/thriller, it's full of clichés and stupid character moments.

Still, If you like the premise, it's well worth the hefty, hasty read.
7 people found this helpful

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