Hi Fantasy Inn readers, if you haven’t been hiding in a cave recently you’ll probably be aware that most of us debut authors have been forced either indoors or underground to deal with ouronce-in-100-years generational catastrophe, so Fantasy Inn been quite generously handing over the reins to us to make up the shortfall of actually seeing people face-to-face!
So as someone who is releasing a book with a very obvious brace of tentacles on the cover, (Monstrous Heart, April 2020) I thought I’d take the opportunity to deep dive into the fantasy sea monster and why it’s so linked to certain genres, and a certain age, that strange time when monsters were real enough to warrant further study.
There’s a lovely line in Billy Joel’s Downeaster Alexa where he sings of the “giants out there in the canyons”, and it’s a good place to start on sea monsters in genre. Even in a song about a guy and a fishing boat in 1990 (doing business in what is still fairly in-shore waters) its fun to hear the inevitable invocation of the sea monster Billy-The-Sailor may or may not run into.
Time to throw away the poster of catch size-limits, there’s something big down there…
As a regular reader of fantasy knows, an unspoken rule suggests that certain design elements on a book cover will allude to an era more than any other. So when the castle foreshadows some medieval low-tech and high-magic, and any wide shot involving a planet with serious low earth orbit hardware is an unnamed future, you can bet your last iTunes Voucher that a big ol’ tentacle is going to slap your reader right into the middle of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s… modern sightings of Architeuthis off the modern coast of New Zealand be dammed.
And what made our kraken, our ‘great calamary’ so important an image? It seems strange at first, as the Industrial revolution was really about technology, the rise of machine power and early computing, things completely opposite to the natural world.
Obviously by the mid 1800s the Golden Age of Sail had exponentially increased ‘eyes on the water’. Those tales of sea-monsters seen during long voyages had captured a public more and more confined to factories, officers and an increasingly urbanized life. In one book, Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883) the naturalist Henry Lee (Free here at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36677) prefaces several authors and publishers of mid-1800’s who were suddenly quite interested in the fact and fiction of sea-monsters, and opened up their periodicals for discussion among their readers. In both 1873 and 1887 Showman PT Barnum, (who recently returned in the guise of Hugh Jackman but probably didn’t sing and dance in real life), offered the equivalent of millions if someone were to bring evidence of a certain sea monster that lived in the giant lake between New York and Vermont.
No doubt the sudden interest in zoology and naturalism alongside the great steam-powered factories had been kicked off by Charles Darwin’s startling observations of evolution, Mary Annings’ discovery of complete plesiosaur fossils on the south coast of England and other discoveries from germ theory to epidemiology. With such evidence, who could not doubt that some monstrosities still existed?
The Godfather of modern sea-monster stories will always be Jules Verne’s 1869 serial, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. In our classic proto-steampunk adventure a crew in search of a sea monster get captured by a submarine captain who—in a surprising bit of Verne forethought—jaunts round in an electric submarine. The serial novel—with giant squid and all– turned out to be a huge inspiration for all speculative fiction to come and set the aesthetic benchmark for the writers who would revisit it over a century after.
As sea voyages became shorter, and whaling declined, and the wars of the first half of the 20th century relaced the romance of the seas, our giant kraken dwindled into a past that was less militaristic and perhaps was once a little more hopeful. By the end of World War Two, nuclear technology and the Space Race had taken over in the creative terror department—monsters in between atoms and planets, rather than under the sea.
So flash forward to 2017, when I found myself writing a book with a man who hunts sea monsters. Almost instantly the time period asserted itself. I could have chosen any period, but for those deep cultural reasons my setting aligned itself to that post-Revolution world, and the genre fell into a gothic mystery-romance in the true sense of the word. Modern monstrosities such as Peter Watt’s Starfish might require more science to explain its central monstrosity, but even the fantasy novels of the ninetieth century never quite gave in to realism. No need to be sceptical, they said. Imagine a world where all this could be proven true…
*Steampunk Transformers had a run in the IDW comic mini-series Hearts of Steel in 2006. Don’t ask me about the movies… https://transformers.fandom.com/wiki/Hearts_of_Steel
Urban explorer, adventurer and science fiction fan, Claire McKenna is an Australian SFF writer who is wrangling the release of her debut novel during a global pandemic. She is a graduate of the first Clarion South Writer’s Workshop, and her short stories have been nominated for Australian SFF’s top awards, the Aurealis and Ditmar.
Her website can be found at www.clairemckenna.net and MONSTROUS HEART her Gothic Fantasy-Mystery with lashings of dark romance will be available in all formats at:https://www.harpercollins.com/9780008337148/monstrous-heart/
