The Ghost from the Grand Banks draws much from historical facts about the Titanic and its last voyage, about the undersea operations such as the Glomar Explorer's deployment to salvage a Soviet Russian nuclear submarine in 1974, and about the computer graphic representations generated by the Mandelbrot Set of calculations. Clarke, too, writes from experience as a diver and salvager-treasure hunter, making much of the description of scenes and undersea activities very easy to imagine. Published in 1990, the novel sets much of its action in the year 2007, but at the end, closes the tale with yet another probe of the wreck by an alien craft from far in the future.

1. Clarke is not known for deep development of characters in all of his novels, but in The Ghostfrom the Grand Banks, he gives the reader a fairly good exposure to the lives of Jason Bradley, and Donald...