The novel pretty much delivered a darn awesome experience from start to finish. I love the whole idea of having to dive through the clouds back down to a radioactive surface in search of ship parts to keep humanity afloat. The concept was one that hooked me straight away. The only way to keep these ships afloat is by sending teams of divers down to Earth’s surface to find the resources from the ancient factories the ships were built in. These airships were not designed for long-term habitation. The only option was for humanity to live in vast airships (ironically, the very same airships that had dropped the bombs that doomed the Earth). Hell Divers takes place two-hundred and fifty years after World War Three effectively destroyed the Earth rendering it an uninhabitable world to live on. Having not really sank my teeth into any science-fiction novels as of late, I decided to rectify that by diving (see what I did there …) straight into the Hell Diver series.

But there’s something down there that’s far worse than the mutated creatures discovered on dives in the past-something that threatens the fragile future of humanity. When one of the remaining airships is damaged in an electrical storm, a Hell Diver team is deployed to a hostile zone called Hades. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers: men and women who risk their lives by diving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to earth long ago. More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search for a habitable area to call home.

Nicholas sansbury smith hell divers