Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (Today Show Book Club #25)($10.43Value)

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“Readers new to the work of Christopher Moore will want to know two things immediately. First: Where has this guy been hiding? (Answer: In plain sight, since he has a cult following.)…[H]e writes laid back fables straight out of Margaritaville, on the cusp of humor and science fiction.”―Janet Maslin, New York Times Whale researcher Nathan Quinn has a problem. It’s not a new problem; in fact, it’s been around for nearly 20 million years. And Nate’s spent most of his adult life working to solve it. You see, although everybody (well, almost everybody) knows that humpback whales sing (outside of human composition, the most complex songs on the planet) no one knows why. Nate, a Ph.D. in behavior biology, intends to discover the answer to this burning question―and soon. Every winter he and Clay Demolocus, his partner in the Maui Whale Research Foundation, ply the warm waters between the islands of Maui and Lanai, recording the eerily beautiful songs of the humpbacks and returning to their lab for electronic analysis. The trouble is, Nate’s beginning to wonder if he hasn’t spent just a little too much time in the sun. Either that, or he’s losing his mind. Because today, as he was shooting an I.D. photo of a humpback tail fluke, Nate could’ve sworn he saw the words “Bite Me” scrawled across the whale’s tail. . . “[O]ne of finest pieces of imagination since Anatole France’s Penguin Island, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm.” - Denver Post “Humor that seamlessly blends lunacy with larceny . . . habit-forming zaniness.” - USA Today “Moore’s career has plainly been one of scaling new peaks; with the current book [Fluke] he might just have outdone himself . . . If the ghost of Jules Verne had conspired with Rudy Rucker and Tom Robbins to produce a novel, Fluke might very well make them hang their heads in defeat. . . .This novel is all ambergris, no blubber.” - Washington Post Book World Just why do humpback whales sing? That's the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me. Trouble is, Nate's beginning to wonder if he hasn't spent just a little too much time in the sun. 'Cause no one else on his team saw a thing -- not his longtime partner, Clay Demodocus; not their saucy young research assistant; not even the spliff-puffing white-boy Rastaman Kona (né Preston Applebaum). But later, when a roll of film returns from the lab missing the crucial tail shot -- and his research facility is trashed -- Nate realizes something very fishy indeed is going on. By turns witty, irreverent, fascinating, puzzling, and surprising, Fluke is Christopher Moore at his outrageous best. Christopher Moore  is the author of eighteen previous novels, including Razzmatazz , Shakespeare for Squirrels ,  Noir ,  Secondhand Souls, Sacré Bleu, Fool,  and  Lamb . He lives in San Francisco, California. Fluke By Moore, Christopher Perennial ISBN: 006056668X Chapter One Big and Wet. Next Question? Amy called the whale punkin. He was fifty feet long, wider than a city bus, and weighed eighty thousand pounds. One well-placed slap of his great tail would reduce the boat to fiberglass splinters and its occupants to red stains drifting in the blueHawaiian waters. Amy leaned over the side of the boat and lowered the hydrophone down on the whale. "Good morning, punkin," she said. Nathan Quinn shook his head and tried not to upchuck from the cuteness of it, of her, while surreptitiously sneaking a look at her bottom and feeling a little sleazy about it. Science can be complex. Nate was a scientist. Amy was a scientist, too, but she looked fantastic in a pair ofkhaki hiking shorts, scientifically speaking. Below, the whale sang on, the boat vibrated with each note. The stainless rail at the bow began to buzz. Nate could feel the deeper notes resonate in his rib cage. The whale was into a section of the song they called the "green" themes, a long series of whoops that sounded like an ambulance driving through pudding. A less trained listener might have thought that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, shouting howdy to the world to let everyone and everything know that he was alive and feeling good, but Nate was a trained listener, perhaps the most trained listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was saying -- Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he? That's why they were out there floating in that sapphire channel off Maui in a small speedboat, sloshing their breakfasts around at seven in the morning: No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea why, exactly, they sang. "He's into his ribbits," Am