High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Deepwater Black is a 1995 novel, first in the Deepwater trilogy, by the New Zealand science fiction writer Ken Catran, where a cast of young characters are supposedly stranded in space while a virus ravages Earth. The book series itself is quite different from the television series later developed. The approach of the novels focused on the characters as younger children, around 13-14 rather than the television approach where the characters were much older.