Escaping the Terrestrial Mess: Eight Books About Intelligent Sea Creatures
I like to say my new novel, Underjungle, is a tale of love, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. So War and Peace, but three-thousand feet deeper. And considerably shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. It’s also the story of an intelligent, meditative, and sometimes tempestuous species that discover a human body and the cascade of consequences to their world.
As I prepared to write it, I researched the novel in two very different ways. The obvious one was by poring through books on cephalopods, ichthyology, ocean science, and other forms of marine life. I’d written a lot about the ocean as a journalist, and I knew the importance of getting my facts right. But Underjungle is also a novel about the water, and what it’s like to live in it and call it home, relying on it for everything you have or know—whether it’s nourishment, minerals, mates, shelter, or ideas. We human beings live on land, but we live in the air. The only parts of us regularly on the ground are the soles of our feet.
But the water is a place full of surge, saturation, rhythms, waves, and tides. To live in the ocean is to submit to its currents and to be engulfed. So the second thing I did to write Underjungle was to put on a mask and fins—sometimes scuba diving, and other times free diving, mostly in Hawaii, where I live—and I simply sank. Nestled amid coral at 70 feet or hovering higher up with blue all around me, I watched the way the water coheres to itself, how it fills with particles and myriad forms of life, and the way the different creatures move through it, just as the water moves, itself. Until we understand what the ocean is—and how it isn’t so much a resource for minerals and food, but an environment for life we still barely understand—there will never be any real conservation, because the ocean will be something we study instead of something we love. In Underjungle, I call my invented species the yc. It’s the Mongolian word for water. And it’s pronounced almost like “us.”
The seven novels and one essay collection below all feature intelligent sea creatures who become part of our world, or else we enter theirs. Regardless of whether the sea creature is the hero or villain, ocean stories give us a chance to explore—or escape to—a shifting, drifting world that’s gracefully distanced from our terrestrial mess.
Read my full article in Lit Hub here.