Fish people of the Abyss

Warwick Goble

Photomechanical reproduction of a watercolour

H.G. Wells, ‘In the Abyss,’ 165

In science romance the oceans were regarded as almost as mysterious as outer space, with adventures at the bottom of the sea running in parallel with interplanetary exploration. Interchangeable, too, were marine and cosmic monsters. Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) includes details of monstrous creatures of the deep which could have come from another planet (notably the gigantic squid), and in his fiction of the abyss Wells presents decidedly otherworldly entities. Goble depicts them as both piscine and humanoid, so stressing Wells’s deployment of the alien as a means to comment on human society, and to suggest the author’s concern with the linkage between human and animal kind and the slippage between the two. [Click on image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.]