Creatures of Moonshine: H. G. Wells’s ‘The Sea Raiders’ and the Oceanic Romance

Alder, Emily

Abstract

There is a strand of nineteenth-century fiction interested in tentacled monsters based to a greater or lesser extent on cephalopods. Although the legendary kraken remained a legend, biology had learned a little about the real existence of giant squid, which helped fuel narratives such as Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, Jules Verne’s Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, W. H. Hodgson’s The Boats of the Glen Carrig, and H. G. Wells’s ‘The Sea Raiders’. What made cephalopods such appealing creatures for writers of weird, horror, and science fiction has been the subject of some critical consideration, relating to their limb type, liminal bodies, or hybrid categorisation. However, I turn attention here to a different characteristic of such creatures: their origin and habitat of the deep sea. Fictional cephalopods’ ontological status as creatures of the deep, I suggest, is what makes them so unsettling in stories such as ‘The Sea Raiders’ (1896). H. G. Wells is known, of course, for pioneering the ‘scientific romance’. In this paper, I put the imaginative and ontological qualities of the sea together with the history and scientific understanding of the deep in the late nineteenth century to offer a reading of Wells’s popular but little-studied short story as an ‘oceanic romance’.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: BSLS 2022 Annual Conference
• Start Date: Apr 7, 2022
• End Date: Apr 9, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 17, 2023