Grand Conception — Charles Morgan

This is the first book in the Morning Bliss trilogy. The multinational corporations have long since snapped office tower from carpark, slithered into the rising waters of global warming and evolved into magnificent living creatures. These now inhabit the great ocean, with their human staff as crew and responsible for their reproduction. Skiff, naïve, wildly adventurous and feckless, works as a wage slave - fixed plant operator (oars) - in the huge young male battleship Kincazion. Hordes of battle-mad admirals, bosuns, and all types of bicep-geoffrey also inhabit this city-sized ship. Anthem, a bright and forceful young woman, blue haired, dark skinned and impossibly beautiful, lives in the vast female cathedral Mahandaahl. There she studies at the University of Engineering, an institution mainly devoted to dogmatic rote learning and deportment. She has ambitions in shipbuilding and hopes to get a job with the Committee of Dialectical Purity, which has the task of building the Cathedral's babies. Skiff escapes and, with the vile Ploode after him, aspires to be an admiral while Anthem manages to see through the rigid conformity that has suffocated the cathedral. Together they aim to get the battleship to make love to the cathedral and conceive a baby ship