
Alaimo applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Stacy Alaimo's website.In keeping with the surrealist’s respect for dreams, this passage expresses both an urgent desire to know what the creatures look like and a resignation to the fact that they elude visual capture. Phyllis had complained earlier of “too much geography . . . and too much oceanography, and too much bathyography: too much of all the ographies and lucky to escape ichthyology,” but her dreams ironically voice a desire for ichthyology. Recall Oreskes: the ocean science in this period could have been otherwise— less militaristic oceanography and more marine biology.Page 99 of my book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life, does suggest several strong currents flowing through the book, including the dynamics of aesthetic and scientific "capture" of species, speculations about unfathomable abyssal life, and the surreal, alien, and monstrous. So the Page 99 Test does work, to some extent, but only as a mirror image of much of the book. This page analyzes John Wyndham's science fiction novel from 1953, The Kraken Wakes, in which mysterious creatures from the deep explode onto the surface and begin to take over the planet. The characters speculate for hundreds of pages about who or what these "alien" creatures are, without ever knowing anything definitive, and without being enchanted by the beauty or mystery of the deep seas. This time period, from WWII through the late 20th century, was an era, as Naomi Oreskes documents in Science on a Mission, when U.S. ocean science was narrowly focused on military matters and ignored marine biology. The mid-20th century period, lacking a focus on deep sea biology, hovers in the middle of The Abyss Stares Back, book-ended by William Beebe's bathysphere descents "a half mile down" in the 1930s and the late 20th-early 21st century era of deep sea discovery. Beebe and one of his painters Else Bostelmann, engaged with hundreds of deep sea "specimens," depicting them as gorgeously surreal and speculating about their perspectives, lives, and habitats. The Census of Marine Life, at the end of the 20th century also complemented deep sea discovery with an emphasis on the stunning beauty and biodiversity of the marine life. While the cool speculation of the characters in The Kraken Wakes does not engender awe, passionate curiosity, or concern for deep sea life, most of the science, science writing, science fiction, art, and activist media in the book demonstrates how the aesthetics of abyssal life travels through science and popular culture to provoke wonder, curiosity, and attachment, extending environmentalism to the bottom of the sea.
Phyllis describes her dreams of the “sea bottom,” imaging benthic lifeworlds, only to then place all her hope on capture, objectification, and war: “if only we could capture one and examine it we should know how to fight them.” The novel concludes with Phyllis asking whether the latest warfare against the bathies— deadly ultrasonic waves— has yielded any knowledge. “But have they discovered what Bathies are . . . What they look like?” Cue Oreskes again, to explain how oceanography in the 1940s and 1950s was aimed at military pursuits rather than marine biology. The novel’s answer echoes the repeated historical failures to capture gelatinous animals as specimens: “Not so far as I know. All Bocker said was that a lot of jelly stuff came up and went bad in the sunlight. No shape to it.” These dismissals reveal a lack of wonder as well as a lack of scientific information. The characters also lack speculative talents as their attempts at understanding the bathies are constricted to anthropocentric expectations regarding the shape of life itself. The novel seems to critique the sophisticates’ lack of curiosity even as it declines to conjure up creaturely perspectives. The endless polite chattering about the bathies is not exactly riveting, but appropriately, it does leave the desire for the unknowable unquenched, as science, journalism, and literature become modes of inquiry in which speculation builds on fact. Moreover, the narrative’s rather nonchalant tone discourages readers from demonizing deep-sea life. The novel’s submersion of the marvelously bewildering abyssal life-forms within the unflappable tone and sedate pace of the narrative may encourage a transfer in which creatures from the abyss, however strange they may seem, are understood not as monstrous or abject or alien but instead as irreducibly different in their intelligence, yet to themselves, for themselves, and in their place, utterly ordinary. As Mike and Phyllis conclude the novel by pondering what it will be like to live with only “a
--Marshal Zeringue