Preface
by
Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
Of all the fabulous creatures who populate the worlds of fantasy—dragons, unicorns, griffins, trolls, mermaids—the sea serpent is the only one who may actually exist in the corporeal world as well as in the world of the imagination. At the very least, it is the one fabulous beast whose existence is still widely believed in by a significant percentage of the contemporary population. For instance, there are probably very few (if any) citizens of the modern world who still believe in the actual physical existence of, say, griffins or sphinxes or centaurs—but every year there are dozens of eyewitness reports of sea serpents (or USOs—Unidentified Swimming Objects—as they are sometimes called), as there have been year after year for centuries.
There have been literally thousands of reports of sea serpents, many of them by trained observers: naturalists, oceanographers, experienced seamen, naval officers, submarine crews. Sometimes they have been seen by hundreds of people at once, as in the nineteenth-century sighting by the crew of HMS Daedalus, or in the sightings of the famous Gloucester Sea Serpent, who for a decade from 1817 on appeared every summer off the New England coast, where it was often observed by crowds of monster-watchers. Nor are sea serpents restricted to the open ocean. Similar creatures known as "lake monsters" have been spotted for hundreds of years in lakes all over the world. The Loch Ness Monster—familiarly known as "Nessie"—is the most famous of these elusive creatures, but there is also "Issie," the monster of Japan's Lake Ikeda, "Champ," the monster of Lake Champlain, "Ogopogo," the monster of western Canada's Lake Okanagan, "Manipogo," the monster of Manitoba's Lake Winnipegosis, Sweden's Storsjön Animal, the Black Beast of Quebec's Lake Ponenegamook, and Iceland's Lágarfljótsormur, among many others.
Even after hundreds of sightings, though, no irrefutable physical evidence of the existence of sea serpents has ever been found—barring a few blurry and indistinct photographs that are not only inconclusive, but often fiercely contested by people who are convinced that they are the work of hoaxers. None of these creatures have ever been captured or killed, no authenticated remains or carcasses have ever been found; even the fossil record is empty of their traces.
So then, if we say, for the sake of argument, that sea serpents do not exist—then just what is it that all of these people have been seeing?
There are as many theories as there are theorists. Discounting deliberate hoaxes, delusions, and hallucinations, the candidates include: illusions caused by winds or currents, floating trees, the wash from passing vessels, sea weed, motorboats, up welling gas bubbles, masses of floating birds, gaseous rubbish floating up from the bottom, whales, schools of porpoises, watersnakes, leaping salmon, sturgeons, elephant seals, walruses, giant sea turtles (which do exist), giant long-necked seals (whose existence is conjectural), giant otters of an unknown species (the largest known otter was eight feet long—but sea serpents are often reported to be forty feet long or more), conger eels, ribbonfish, manta rays, basking sharks, sunfish, sea-going crocodiles, sea slugs (of an unknown giant variety), worms (ditto), alligator gars, giant squids, giant octopuses, the supposedly extinct Steller's Sea Cow (the last living specimen of which was seen in 1768), manatees, zeuglodons (primitive ancestral whales, the skeletons of which do look quite a bit like eyewitness descriptions of sea serpents), and, of course, the ever-popular Plesiosaurs (the image of the sea serpent as a long-necked, flippered, dinosaurlike swimming prehistoric survivor has probably established itself as the most common idea of what sea serpents would look like—if we could ever find one).
And yet there is some circumstantial physical evidence: a very detailed and sober description in a wartime report of a dead monster that washed ashore in Scotland in 1942; the sonar gear of the USS Stein, which, when hauled out in dry dock for examination, proved to have been gouged and battered by a creature of "a species still unknown to science"—who had left hundreds of pointed teeth embedded in the rubber covering of the sonar dome; inconclusive but suggestive sonar tracings of vast swimming objects of unknown types that have been recorded from time to time; and the aforementioned photographs, some of which, in spite of their blurriness, do seem to show a large physical object of some sort out in the middle of the water where no such object should be.
So who knows. One thing is sure—if they caught Nessie tomorrow, all the other candidates (however reasonable they might now seem) for what Unidentified Swimming Objects really are would be at once dismissed, and all the reasons why there couldn't be such a creature would be instantly and easily forgotten.
In the meantime, whether sea serpents exist in fact or not, they have been alive and swimming for years in the imaginations of fantasy writers, and swim there still, mysterious and huge, elusive and powerful and vast . . . as the stories you are about to read will vividly and evocatively demonstrate.