Previous chapters of the Bestiary have been mostly linear. I’ve organized them by categories and species and locations. Now that we’re headed out to sea, I’d like to be more free-form. Let’s go where the tides of whim and research take us.
My definition of “monster” here is broad. It can be mythical or legendary, but it can be real, too. It can be very large or very unusual or downright weird. Maybe we’ve known about it forever. Maybe we thought it was mythical, until it turned up onshore or in a net or on a deep-water cam. Maybe it’s new to science.
Humans can get kind of full of themselves. Pinnacle of creation, top of the animal kingdom, most intelligent, Man The Toolmaker. We’ve certainly left our mark on the planet. We can get to thinking we rule the world.
Even the land never fails to surprise us, and we know considerably more about it than we do about the ocean. It’s 70% of the earth’s surface. Its average depth is around 3600 meters (12,000 feet). We’ve mapped about a quarter of the sea floor, but we’ve barely begun to explore what’s down there.
For a science fiction or fantasy writer, the ocean is a source of endless inspiration. The sheer range and variety of sea life is boggling. It’s amazing enough in the shallows we’re most familiar with, but the deeper you go, the weirder it gets. There are things down there that are as alien as anything you can find on a science-fictional world. But they’re right here, on our planet.
I’ll be looking at all kinds of sea creatures, from the whale and its relatives to the sea snake to the seahorse to the many forms of the jellyfish, to the eerie beauty of siphonophores, to all the myriad kinds and shapes of fish, to corals and sponges and sea stars, to the octopus and the squid and the Kraken that’s half a myth and half reality. Let’s not forget the great movie monsters, either, beginning with Godzilla.
What’s your favorite sea creature? It can appear in a book or a film or a TV series. Or it can be in a scientific study, a new species or one that’s revealed new facets of itself. The possibilities are endless. I won’t pretend to be able to talk about them all, but we can have some fun exploring the wonders of the seven seas.