Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, NY Library of Congress Catalog Number 70-97651

Photo: RV Aluminaut DSV on display at The Science Museum of Virginia

From the book's jacket: "The range was not the entire world. But it was more than 80% of it, and all water. The nuclear war had long since melted much of the polar ice caps. Whole sections of continents were long gone. Hive cities had been set up under the surface of the water. Set in this world of the future, The Hydronauts tells of a team of marine wardens picked by the International Marine Counsel. There is Kim, the leader of the group; Toby, whose ancestors had come from the forgotten country once called Japan; Tuktu, who came from McKinley City in what once was Alaska; and Genright, who had been selected for warden training in the Hive City deep within a plateau of ancient Ethiopia. Carl L. Biemiller tells of a future environment in which men live beneath the sea, can communicate with dolphins, and can preserve human beings in a state of suspended animation for centuries."

Eric's Comments It is interesting to me that Dad chose the undersea world for his last series. I entered the U.S. Navy in 1963. I was selected for the Navy's nuclear program and became an instructor at the Navy nuclear prototype in upstate New York. I served and qualified in submarines on the USS Kamehameha SSB(N) 642. The Kam, as we called her, was a Polaris missile platform. The Hydronauts was published the year I was honorably discharged from the Navy. Regarding the trilogy, Dad admits, "I was back with the options and problems of serialization by a process I can describe only as planned inadvertence" (from Something about the Author- see details. ) After I became Dad's literary heir, I was asked to review a segment of The Hydronauts being inserted into a fifth grade reader. The editor of the reader had changed Toby's sex from female to male. I guess it wasn't politically correct to have a male and female live together on a submarine/work station in the kelp forests and seas of Dad's imagination. I didn't feel it was correct to change a thing Dad wrote, so you'll never see The Hydronauts in a school book (at least to my knowledge).

How Submarines Work