The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths

'Exquisite & shocking... just as any exploration of the deep should be' — Helen Scales, author of The Brilliant Abyss

'[A] rich, strange book' — China Miéville, author of The City & the City

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11 June, 1930. On a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, a curious steel ball is lowered 3000 feet into the sea. Crumpled up inside, gazing through three-inch thick quartz windows, sits the famed zoologist William Beebe. With uncontrollable excitement, he watches as bizarre, never-before-seen creatures flit out of the inky blackness, illuminated by explosions of bioluminescence. He is the first person to witness this alien world.

Beebe's dives take place against the backdrop of a transforming & paradoxical America, home to ground-breaking scientists, eccentric adventurers, & eugenicist billionaires. Yet under the ocean's crushing pressure, scientific...