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INTRODUCTION

Water, Water, Everywhere . . .

Hank Davis



In one of the hour-long episodes of that fondly remembered sixties TV show, Secret Agent (known as Danger Man until it crossed the Atlantic to the colonies), John Drake, superbly played by Patrick McGoohan, is talking with a woman in a room, wherein there is a globe of the Earth. She spins it and wishes she could put her finger on it and be instantly transported there. “I’d be careful,” Drake says. “It’s three-quarters water.”

That’s not just a twist on the adage “Be careful what you wish for,” but also a witty reminder that the Earth is a water planet, with scarcely any company in that category in the solar system. Mercury, closest to the sun, is much too hot. Next out is Venus, whose clouds hiding its surface once gave the literary imagination of twentieth-century sf writers free rein to imagine a planet even wetter than Earth, maybe like our planet in its Carboniferous period, possibly even with homegrown dinosaur analogs lumbering through forests of giant ferns (oh, joy!), or even much wetter than Earth, with planetwide oceans covering Venus from pole to pole. Alas, radio telescopes in the mid 1950s were turned on the planet, and detected radio waves indicating the planet’s clouds were at least as hot as boiling water. Further observations indicated that those clouds were composed of hydrocarbons rather than water vapor. After a Russian space probe landed on the planet’s surface and confirmed that Venus is a plausible stand-in for Hell, if without brimstone, Brian Aldiss edited an anthology of stories set in the Venus we wanted but didn’t get, titled Farewell Fantastic Venus (when that Brit book was reprinted across the pond, it was given the rather lame title of All About Venus, and several stories were dropped). More recently George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois edited an all-original anthology, Old Venus, with more stories of the Venus that never was.

Mars, orbiting farther out than Earth, also stirred the imaginations of fiction writers even before H.G. Wells and his War of the Worlds, particularly after the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing channels on the planet’s surface. Others, particularly the American astronomer Percival Lowell, postulated a dying civilization on Mars, sustained by a planetwide system of canals which collect water from the icecap at the pole and carry it out to the parched planet’s surface. Observers watching Mars through telescopes during times of closest approach to Earth drew maps of the surface which we now know to be the product of the observers’ imaginations.

Going outward to the gas giants, Jupiter may have plenty of water, but it also has a lot of methane and ammonia. One of its moons, Europa, is covered with ice, as in water ice, and may have an ocean underneath, and maybe even life. We’ll have to await word from future space explorers.

Getting back to the oceans we have on the home world, while they cover most of the surface, they really are only a thin film, with an average depth of less than two and a half miles. Of course, the part of the atmosphere we humans inhabit is also only a thin film with the layer where the weather happens, the troposphere, only seven miles deep. (Other nations have different names for the different layers of the atmosphere, but troposphere, stratosphere, ionosphere, and exosphere are what I grew up with.) And puny humans, as the Hulk might put it, need supplemental oxygen above twenty thousand feet. But time and evolution have filled both those thin films with myriad inhabitants of all shapes and sizes, though the sizes of ocean dwellers dwarf those on land, thanks to water’s buoyancy countering the pull of gravity.

And while the blue whale is the biggest animal on Earth that we know about, bigger critters may be lurking in the ocean deeps. If the long-suffering reader will bear with me, I’ll resurrect a bit of the introductory material I wrote for my 2014 Baen anthology, The Baen Big Book of Monsters:


In Astounding Days, his memoir-like salute to the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction, Arthur C. Clarke discusses the possibility of very large creatures of the deeps which are still unknown to us. After noting that the few specimens of the celebrated giant squid that have washed ashore may not represent full-grown adults, who might be up to one hundred and fifty feet in length according to one expert, he cited evidence that even bigger creatures might be hiding below the waves. In 1896 a badly decayed sea dweller washed ashore, weighing in at six or seven tons. It was thought to be a dead whale, and samples were taken and preserved. When one of the fragments was examined in 1971, the creature turned out to be an octopus, possibly two hundred feet in size. Incidentally (or perhaps not), shortly before I wrote this introduction, [that is, in 2014] news came out about a Great White, the superstar of sharks since Jaws, that had been tagged with a tracking device and was suddenly pulled down into really deep water, as if grabbed by a more formidable predator. The tracking device, without the shark attached, later washed up on a beach.


Then there’s the famed sea serpent, mostly thought to be legend, but then the giant squid, romantically known as the kraken, was also thought to be legend, until dead specimens turned up. The rocketry pioneer and distinguished science writer, Willy Ley, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, scoffed at flying saucers and ESP, but took reports of sea serpents seriously. Since none of the stories in this anthology involve sea serpents, I’ll leave the question of their existence in the “interesting if true” category, though if a two-hundred-foot octopus can hide in the very big oceans, a mere fifty-or-so-foot-long serpentlike creature could certainly keep out of sight. Willy Ley also took seriously the legend of Atlantis, the continent which sank beneath the sea, though he suspected that Plato was passing on tales of warriors from an island which had the bad luck to have its volcano become active. Atlantis lore has expanded since Plato, with mystics claiming that it was a superscience realm with flying machines called vimanas, and other cool science fictional goodies. So advanced, in fact, that one wonders how a mere sinking continent could have wiped them out. Other mystics, wanting equal time for the Pacific, claim that there was yet another sunken continent, named Mu, hiding beneath that ocean, also loaded with gee-whiz advanced tech and mystic powers. But as P. Schuyler Miller, sf writer, indefatigable book reviewer, and amateur archaeologist, once commented, the proponents of Atlantis at least have Plato on their side, while the advocates for Mu have nothing but psychic revelations and other such mystic wordage as “proof.” Take that, James Churchward.

Of course, legends about the sea must be as old as the primitive tribes who lived by its shores. They had no idea that the planets were anything but stars with odd paths in the sky, and the Moon, showing only one side, might be a flat plate. But the sea was right there, familiar yet mysterious, stretching far out beyond where the eye could see. Was there even another side to it? From things washing up on the shore, it was obvious it had odd inhabitants. Later civilizations had legends, too. I dimly recall that some eminent person (Mohammed?) was shown a fish by the Almighty which was so large that it took a day and a night to swim past him. Then there’s the folly of sailors making camp on an island which turns out to be a very large fish or whale.

As others have noted, a technological society has its legends, too, such as science fiction, and sf heroes have been getting their feet wet for a long time. Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a well-known example, though it should be noted that submarines did exist prior to Captain Nemo’s fictional Nautilus, and one was even used, if with mixed success, in the American Civil War. And, contrary to the Disney movie version, the Nautilus was not powered by atomic energy, but rather by electricity, which itself was advanced for the time. And the novel was part of Verne’s series of Voyages Extraordinaire, which include Five Weeks in a Balloon and Around the World in Eighty Days, and the “20,000 leagues” of the title refers to the distance traveled while submerged, not the depth reached. A league is approximately three land miles, and even though the Mariana Trench, a sort of underwater Grand Canyon, holds the depth record, its floor is only a bit less than seven miles beneath the surface. Nonetheless, two monster movies of the 1950s may have been titled so as to sound Vernian: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues. (If you didn’t know, a fathom is six feet, which I hope helps the long-suffering reader to fathom what’s wrong with the title.) At least The Beast was based on a Ray Bradbury story, “The Foghorn” (more accurately, about five minutes of it was), and boasted special effects by legendary master Ray Harryhausen, while The Phantom just had a big guy in a rubber suit which looked nothing like the more interesting critter on the movie’s poster.

Arthur Conan Doyle had taken time off from Sherlock Holmes to write The Lost World, which stayed on dry land, and later wrote a short novel, The Maracot Deep, which started out well, but came up with an absurd explanation for the undersea explorers not being crushed by water pressure and ended with a flurry of the mysticism which absorbed Doyle in his later years. As far as I’ve been able to find out, the Maracot Deep is a part of the ocean existing only in Doyle’s imagination, though in the late 1950s, Henry Slesar wrote a forgettable novelette, The Secret of Maracot Deep, recycling the name in the title.

Not forgettable at all was John Wyndham’s novel The Kraken Wakes, the title recalling Tennyson’s poem, which was retitled Out of the Deeps once it got to these less poetic shores, in which unfriendly aliens invade Earth by landing in the oceans, out of sight and out of reach, and put a stop to ocean travel, then proceed to melt the icecaps and flood the continents. Oddly, it has never been given a film treatment, though there was a good BBC radio adaptation which is worth hearing. Returning to Arthur C. Clarke, he wrote a short story, “The Deep Range,” later adapted into a full-length novel. You can read the original short version here, just a few pages away, which may whet your appetite for the longer tale. Sf masters Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson collaborated on a series of three novels for young adults, Undersea Quest, Undersea Fleet, and Undersea City, later combined in one volume as The Undersea Trilogy (Baen, 1992), beginning with a young trainee in Subsea Academy, a future sort of undersea West Point. Not quite up to Heinlein or Andre Norton’s YA novels, but good fun for older folk who haven’t become terminally grown-up. And a towering classic of the field, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men charts the story of the human race from the 1930s to the end of the species, as the aging sun is on the verge of becoming a nova. In one episode, set on a watery Venus (as I’ve said, nonexistent, alas), humans colonize the planet after being adapted to live underwater, an alteration that has had many later literary echoes, as in Kenneth Bulmer’s City Under the Sea, and Gordon R. Dickson’s connected novels Home from the Shore and The Space Swimmers. And in short stories such as Mary Rosenblum’s “Selkies,” included in these pages.

Movies and TV shows have gone underwater in search of scientifictional thrills. I’ve mentioned the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but there was an earlier silent movie version, available on video, which is impressive for its time of shooting. In between those two epics, there was the movie serial Undersea Kingdom, starring Ray “Crash” Corrigan and Lon Chaney, Jr., in which an experimental rocket-powered sub discovers the undersea city of Atlantis, whose evil ruler, of course, plots to conquer the surface world.

NBC TV in 1953 offered Operation Neptune with another underwater civilization, named Nadiria this time, with another tyrannical ruler with an itch to conquer the surface world, but hampered by having to work his sinister plans on live TV with a skimpy special-effects budget, though I thought the jet-propelled submarines looked cool. The last episode of the show ended with the announcer telling the audience to watch for the return of Operation Neptune in the fall. It didn’t return that fall, but then, they didn’t say which fall.

An early sixties entry was the Irwin Allen production of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which boasted an impressive cast and a fruitcake of a script, whose motivating gimmick is that the Van Allen radiation belts have caught on fire and are baking the planet below them. Probably the best thing about the movie was that Theodore Sturgeon was picked to write a novelization, which was much better than the movie script, and also made the flaming radiation belts more believable, though I later learned that Sturgeon had picked Isaac Asimov’s brain on the subject. The movie gave rise to the TV show, which inexplicably stayed on ABC for several years, one of a handful of sf TV shows of dubious quality from Irwin Allen, such as Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, and so on. I can’t resist giving the title of the parody that Mad magazine published in the show’s first year: “Voyage to See What’s on the Bottom.”

The year 1989 brought James Cameron’s The Abyss, which suffered from being originally released in a cut version, but had a standout cast, and an intelligent script. At the time I wasn’t sure if the nonhuman water dwellers were natives of Earth or visiting extraterrestrials, though the Orson Scott Card novelization of the movie assumes the latter. Critics complained that it was a watery Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I liked it, and I liked the expanded rerelease even more, particularly since the extra footage made it clear why the head Navy SEAL was going bonkers, while the short version seemed to be recycling the standard Tinseltown limousine-liberal notion that all military personnel are psychotic killers at heart. Director Cameron later hit the oceanic jackpot with a cinematic retelling of the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage.

I have by no means exhausted the subject of underwater sf, and I haven’t gotten to Karel Čapek’s brilliant satire, War with the Newts, or the better-than-it-sounds fifties monster flick, Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, or another fondly remembered book from long ago, Tom Swift and His Jetmarine (I think I was ten or eleven by that time), but if the reader is still patiently slogging through this introduction, I’m keeping her or him from some nifty stories, so as usual, I’ll close by lamenting the absence of several stories which I would have liked to include, but whose reprinting was not in the cards, such as Poul Anderson’s “The Horn of Time the Hunter” (originally published in Amazing Stories as “Homo Aquaticus”), “Driftglass” by Samuel R. Delany, “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny, “Trouble Tide” by James H. Schmitz, “Waterclap” by Isaac Asimov, “The Selchey Kids” by Laurence Yep (his first published story back in 1968, which I nominated for the Nebula at the time), and H.G. Wells’s “In the Abyss.” I recommend all of these stories, and at least in the case of the Wells tale, anyone can read it online at Project Gutenberg.

I also want to give a grateful nod to two books which I was dazzled by when my age was barely in double digits: Half Mile Down by William Beebe, with a great deal about underwater facts and conjectures, culminating in the author’s descent in the bathysphere which he and Otis Barton had constructed. And The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau, who became a hero of mine nearly a decade before he became a TV star on a series of programs narrated by no less than Rod Serling. I no longer have the paperback of the Cousteau book, but I think I recall it closing with something like, “As time passes, humanity can expect to get its feet wet.” Which sounds good to me. And now I’ll step aside and let expert writers get the readers’ literary feet wet.

—Hank Davis

May 2024




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