The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths

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Hypnotic... raises questions of exploration and wonder, of nature and humanity New York Times Book ReviewExquisite and shocking... just as any exploration of the deep should be Helen Scales, author of The Brilliant Abyss[A] rich, strange book China Mieville, author of The City the City____________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.Beebes dives take place against the backdrop of a transforming and paradoxical America, home to ground-breaking scientists, eccentric adventurers, and eugenicist billionaires. Yet under the oceans crushing pressure, scientific expectations disintegrate; the colour spectrum shatters into new dimensions; outlandish organisms thrive where no one expected them.The Bathysphere Book blends research, storytelling, and poetic experiments, traveling through entangled histories of scientific discovery into the bottomless magic of the deep unknown.____________Further praise for The Bathysphere BookThe life work of an explorer-scientist becomes a thing of rich poetry Helen Gordon, author of Notes from Deep TimeA breathtaking book, full of suspense, revelation, and beauty Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an OctopusAn exhilarating read... shiveringly exciting, important, and new Martin MacInnes, author of In AscensionAn impressionistic work of art depicting one of the greatest moments of discovery in human history... tantalizing glimpses of deep-sea life Edith Widder, author of Below the Edge of Darkness: Exploring Light and Life in the Deep SeaA genre-deying book about oceans that is imbued with intelligence, curiosity and wonder Joanna Pocock, author of SurrenderA brilliant work of literary art... a time-bending, gem-laden constellation Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Ultramarine

Reviews

'A weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing, history and poetry that explores our own relationship with the unknown' - Guardian

'Holds up a mirror to a pioneering explorer of the deep seas... Fox unspools a quirky, digressive series of meditations on Beebe, his times and ours' - Financial Times

'Wondrous... Beebes descent becomes a Blakean heaven or hell, as the giant eyeball of the bathysphere hangs in the abyss... As Fox dives into Beebes biography, the book itself becomes the bathysphere' - Philip Hoare

'Hypnotic... Beautifully written... raises questions of exploration and wonder, of nature and humanity, and lets readers find answers on their own' - The New York Times

'Brad Fox knows that the descent into the deep meant a sea-change not just in science, but in aesthetics, philosophy, the sense of what it is to be human. All have been changed, become rich and strange, as this rich, strange book shows so beautifully' - China Mieville, author of 'The City in the City' and 'Perdido Street Station'

Author Bio

Brad Fox is a writer, journalist, translator and former relief contractor living in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily and Guernica, among other publications. His novel To Remain Nameless was a finalist for the Big Other Fiction award and a staff pick at the Paris Review. Fox is a certified scuba diver and has been cave diving in central Budapest, wreck diving in Bermuda, and dived a decommissioned oil platform off the coast of Peru.