30, August 2026

Working Under the Water: Marine Labor, Corporate Power and the Blue Economy in Peter Watts’s Rifters Trilogy

Author(s): ¹ Saranika.S, ² Dr.Brinda.P,

Authors Affiliations:

¹Ph.D. Research Scholar (FT), Department of English, PSG College of Arts & Science, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu – 641014, India.

  ²Associate professor& Head, Department of English, PSG College of Arts & Science, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu – 641014, India.



DOIs:10.2017/IJRCS/202608005     |     Paper ID: IJRCS202608005


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Abstract:

The Rifters Trilogy by Peter Watts, a story about the future. In this future, people use the ocean as an energy source. They also use technologies for retrieving items from the ocean. Some work under the sea. The paper examines Peter Watts’s Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth. The ideas of Blue Humanities are used to think about the people who work in the ocean.The paper says the trilogy by Peter Watts shows workers who are controlled by companies . Such workers are changed by technology to work better in the deep-sea energy industry. The study looks at the use of the ocean for energy and its effects on the people who work there. It sees the ocean as a place of work and the people who work there as tools. The article examines exploitation, corporate power and the blue economy in the work of Peter Watts. It wants to see how sci-fi can speak to justice for the ocean and the people who work there.



Keywords: Marine Labor, Blue Economy, Corporate Exploitation,Oceanic Extraction, Blue Justice

Saranika.S.,  Dr.Brinda P., (2026);  Working Under the Water: Marine Labor, Corporate Power and the Blue Economy in Peter Watts’s Rifters Trilogy, International Journal of Research Culture Society,    ISSN(O): 2456-6683,  Volume – 10,   Issue –  8,  Available on – https://ijrcs.org/

 

REFERENCES:

Mentz, Steve. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. Routledge, 2023.

Oppermann, Serpil. Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Steinberg, Philip E., and Kimberley Peters. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceans as Sites of Relations and Co-Production.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 2, 2015, pp. 247–264.

Watts, Peter. Starfish. Tor Books, 1999.

Watts, Peter. Maelstrom. Tor Books, 2001.

Watts, Peter. Behemoth: β-Max. Tor Books, 2004.

Watts, Peter. Behemoth: Seppuku. Tor Books, 2005.

Yuan, He, Leïla Delphine Choukroune, and Pierre Failler. “Centring Justice for Labour in the New Blue Economy: Principles for Applying Emerging Evidence and Theoretical Critiques to Policy and Practice.” Marine Policy, vol. 168, 2024, article 106327. (University of Portsmouth)




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