1953's 'Shark Ship' is a disturbing novelette about yet another dystopian future Earth. It's been generations since the convoys of gigantic ships, each with 20,000 inhabitants, left the land to live in the Atlantic ocean. We're dealing with the 75 ships of the Grenville Convoy, launched from Newport News, Virginia, 141 years ago. It's the southern spawning season, and everyone old enough to work is working hard. If they don't harvest enough food to last for six months (until the northern spawning season), they'll starve. Each fleet patrols two degrees of the ocean.

We learn about their way of life and their ships' construction. 20,000 persons per ship is necessary because they have to constantly search for corrosion and oil what they find. Couples are allowed two children, the replacement rate. If a ship loses its net, it and its inhabitants are abandoned by the convoy because there isn't enough material to make a new one.

Captain Salter of Ship Starboard 30 has to help his people when their net is lost in a storm. The ship makes its way to New York City. What they find there (and the flashback that tells us how it got that way) is worthy of a horror movie. I do appreciate the fact that Yeoman Jewel Flyte is the quickest and most imaginative thinker among the team.

Notes: 1. Higher ranks may be required to be celibate (unmarried) to avoid nepotism, but chasity (no sex) doesn't seem to be required since Salter had a mistress. The ships stick to a two-kids-only rule, so some form of birth control is probably available.
2. Mae Bush and Rip Torn were actors.
3. "Alien" in this case means "not from our country". (I'm the daughter of a science fiction fan. I was a senior in high school before I realized an alien could be someone from another country instead of another planet.) ( )

A very interesting story of generation ships living off plankton in the Atlantic Ocean, while the people on land find a very odd way to deal with over-population ( )