I love the video game Dredge, where you collect fish of different types and different depths and some have anomalies which is such an interesting game to play for me for the unique and mysterious and awesome ecology to explore.
I also love a video game called decktamer in which you create a deck of animals in the abyss as you explore, another awesome game for its interesting ecology and a tinge of incomprehensibly massive and terrifying creatures.
Now, I want to read a book that fills that similar urge in me. Something written with passion that only someone like a marine biologist may have written, but I almost exclusively like fiction sci Fi or fantasy novels. I've seen some recommended underwater sci Fi, but they're more focused on some world ending event coming from the sea. I'd like one focused on the ecosystem but also adventure and danger.
Recommendations?
by NoDrummer2549
5 Comments
So I’m not entirely sure how much it’ll hit the ecosystem point, as it’s actually been a long time since I read it, but Peter Watts’ *Starfish* is a dark sci-fi set almost entirely underwater and, if I recall, did touch at least a bit on ocean-floor-level marine life.
Underwater Wild: My Octopus Teacher – this is a nonfiction about a man who dies in the ocean and watches and octopus go through its life cycle
Bourne – by Jeff Vandermeer – this is a science fiction with a heavy emphasis on environmentalism, you’re sort of thrown right in the middle of a big “WTF I guess this is our life now”, and sort of follow some survivors as they try to get along. The next book to read would be “dead astronauts”, but it is experimental with some parts being more about sound and experience rather than the words themselves
Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
I think this might kinda fit? Scary mermaids, more sci-fi than fantasy! I loved it, has a dash of horror to it. I’m afraid I’d give off spoilers saying more, but it’s not so much a “world ending eldritch horror” as it is a “scientific discovery with huge implications”.
Not quite as nature loving as you might like (if I recall correctly), but Arthur C Clarke’s Deep Range is about herding whales.
James Blish’s novella *Surface Tension* is about microscopic humans seeded in shallow freshwater puddles on an inhospitable planet. If you like talking paramecium, this is for you!