a deeper sea
Cinnamon-flavored hagfish, how to open a coconut, hunted by sperm whales, speaking up for the blue, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: June 11, 2018.
Foghorn (A Call to Action!)
- Great ocean outreach webinar: Bless your coast: communicating acidification with lessons learned in the Southeast. Tune in June 13th at 1 PM EDT!
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Another entry into the “A Deeper Sea” keeps coming true file: Sperm whales are tracking fishing boats and stealing their fish.
- I’m bummed to be missing Dinacon, but they’re putting out some awesome videos. Ever wonder how to crack open a coconut?
- Join in on an oceanographic cruise already underway! Follow along with the Porcupine Abyssal Plain Observatory.
- Introducing #OceanX and #Alucia2, a bold new initiative to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world! Yes please!
5 fantastic nautical science fiction novels
Enterprise versus Enterprise. From ForeignPolicy.com
One thing I’ve discovered by publishing my first work of nautical science fiction is that the field is incredibly small. There just doesn’t seem to be that many SciFi writers taking their stories out to sea. This seems strange to me, as most of the great space operas are really nautical tales. There’s a reason that TV Tropes has an exhaustive list of entries under “Space is an Ocean” (and, for that matter, “Space Whale“, because we can’t ever have enough Moby-Dick-in-Space stories). It isn’t a coincidence that the US Navy has named at least 7 ships Enterprise (FYI, the aircraft carrier CVN-80 Enterprise is actually bigger than the starship NCC-1701 Enterprise).
So here are my 5 favorite maritime science fiction stories.
Title page for 20,000 Leagues by Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.
The Grand Daddy of maritime science fiction, 20,000 Leagues still holds up. Even though the science is dated, Verne’s insight shines through, predicting the deep-sea gold rush more than 100 years before we even knew about the geologic formations that would produce seafloor massive sulfides. Considering that almost one-fifth of all deep-sea hydrothermal vents are currently at risk for deep-sea mining, Captain Nemo’s declaration that “in the depths of the ocean, there are mines of zinc, iron, silver and gold that would be quite easy to exploit” is particularly prescient.