The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life

by Stacy Alaimo

In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of new species in the deep sea? As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader relationship to the nonhuman world. While many images of these abyssal creatures circulate as shallow clickbait, aesthetic representations can be enticing lures for speculating about their lives, profoundly expanding our environmental concern. The Abyss Stares Back analyzes a diverse range of scientific, literary, and artistic accounts of deep-sea exploration, including work from the naturalist William Beebe and the artist Else Bostelmann as well as results of the Census of Marine Life that began at the turn of the twenty-first century. As she focuses on oft-overlooked creatures of the deep, such as tubeworms, hatchetfish, siphonophores, and cephalopods, which are typically cast as “alien,” Alaimo shows how depictions of the deep seas have been enmeshed in long colonial histories and racist constructions of a threatening abyss. Drawing on feminist environmentalism, posthumanism, science and technology studies, and Indigenous and non-Western perspectives, Alaimo details how our understanding of science is fundamentally altered by aesthetic encounters with these otherworldly life forms. She argues that, although the deep sea is often thought of as a lifeless void with little connection to human existence, our increasing devastation of this realm underscores our ethical obligation to protect the biodiverse life in the depths. When the abyss stares back, it demands recognition. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook, Animals

275 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 13, 2025

Reviews

[Lindsay · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

A very interesting overview of the "blue humanities", the author's term for the analysis of the exploration of the deep sea by means other than just science. It covers a wide range of real and fictional explorations, from the 1930s Bathysphere and the 1950s Alvin, to books like The Kraken Wakes, The Deep Range and Starfish, to movies like Submergence, the Abyss and even Meg 2: The Trench.

Some of the points are really interesting perspectives. However, I got a bit sick of reading about penetration into the depths being about gender relations, and exploring into the black having something to do with Black identity. That's an interesting opinion, but sometimes ... a cigar is just a cigar.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As the aesthetic flows through science, science writing, and science fiction, it frames deep-sea life as intrinsically valuable.”

“While an aesthetic response to deep-sea life may seem a flimsy, wil lowy, and ineffectual mode of encounter, it provides friction against, the brutal and unthinking objectification and extractivism endemic to ideologies of human exceptionalism and domination, and in so doing, it opens possibilities for the environmental protection of abyssal ecologies.”

The deep ocean is broadly defined as beginning at 200 metres below the surface, encompassing 90–95% of the ocean’s volume and making it the largest biome on Earth. Its deeper waters are divided into the bathypelagic (1,000–4,000 metres), abyssopelagic (4,000–6,000 metres) and hadalpelagic (6,000–11,000 metres) zones, each with corresponding benthic, or seafloor, habitats. Often portrayed as alien worlds, these depths harbour extraordinary creatures that challenge our sense of the beautiful, the strange and the unknowable. In this volume we look at how we see these depths through different technologies and people across history that have allowed such an encounter.

In this text we take a chapter by chapter tour of different ways the American public has had encounters with deep sea life. We begin in the 1930s with William Beebe and his expeditions, novels like John Wyndam’s The Kraken Wakes, scientific memoirs such as Cindy Lee Van Dover’s Deep-Ocean Journeys, the Census of Marine Life, and contemporary photography, film and digital media, including Claire Nouvian’s photographic collection The Deep, and films including Aliens of the Deep (2005), Submergence (2017) and Meg 2: The Trench (2023). It also examines novels like Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsuckers (2022) and Nnedi Okorafour’s Lagoon (2014).

The central premise of all of this looking is that the general public cannot directly experience the depths and so must interact with it at a distance. The way in which these interactions are available inform the way the public cares about the depths and wants it to be used or protected. I loved this text so much. I loved how it referenced so many high and low forms of culture on equal footing, how it captured academic insights alongside film makers intent. This is exactly the type of book I love reading for fun!

One aside:

Through this text I was introduced to William Beebe deep sea dives in the 1930s and Elise Bostelmann’s illustrations of the depths. The most important point made is that Beebe captures his wonder about the lives of deep sea creatures alongside scientific discovery and measurement. He imagines their lives and wonders about them, thereby using emotional and aesthetic appreciation rather than only objectfification.

QUOTES:

“The fact that visual representations of nature - be they the classic landscape paintings that shaped the constructed viewpoints of the Grand Canyon or contemporary Sierra Club calendars-have been essential for the development and popularization of U.S. environmentalism has been well established within environmental studies. The deep seas, however-which are not accessible to tourists and ramblers; which can only be experienced through highly mediated, expensive, scientific expeditions; and which are frequently labeled as alien worlds-require their own examination in terms of the aesthetic reception of the beautiful, the surreal, the strange, and the unknowable.”

“The counting of species, assessment of biodiver-sity, and concern for marine ecologies cannot be separated from histories and ongoing practices of colonial taxonomy, biopiracy, and genomic bioprospecting.”

“By contrast, Isabelle Stengers declares, in the volume A World of Many Worlds, "The global West is not a 'world' and recognizes no world. ... A world destroying machine cannot fit with other worlds."

“Haraway charges that “these times called the Anthropocene are times… of unprecendented looking away.”

“Bostelmann epitomizes what Arnaud Gerspacher calls the "artist as ethologist." He asks: "What happens to ethology and the study of animal behavior when the contours of its creaturely subject-object of study can only be traced, alluded to, formulated, touched, and communicated by an artistic jump or, perhaps, even a leap of faith? If this is the case-that certain ontological and epistemological truths can only be ciphered through judicious aesthetic fictions-then is this not what art practices can bring to ethology?"”

“Exposing the lie of transparent, mimetic objectivity, Bostelmann's work captures the specimen in detail while captivating us with its stylized strangeness. The almost geometric, modernist eyes—the eye at the top looking exactly like a piece of metal hardware (a cap nut, to be precise)-tempt us to muse about what it is these fish see. That commonplace piece of hardware, astonishingly out of place, punctuates the surreal aesthetic, scrambling domains by exporting something ordinary from land to a distant and radically different world.”

“Mark Fisher argues that the weird "involves a sensation of wrongness." He explains: "a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate."

“The deep sea unmoors human visitors, immersing them in a state of wonder where they could hardly think straight as reasoning dissolves into marvel-ing. This aesthetic response flows across divides between experts and ordinary people because its immediacy requires no prior knowledge.”

[kylie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fine, but not for me. If I had to summarize: a book about media about the deep sea. It's very dense, and often felt like I was reading a book report.

**I received my copy from Netgalley.

[anonymous side quest · Rating 3 out of 5]

feels like a dissertation-turned book (maybe is?) the perspective is great but i don't think we need a book for this (ofc academia forces us to produce books). feels like posthumanism applied straight to deep sea. also one thing rhetoricians really differ from what i believe in is to always think about the question of "how do we get people's attention to this issue??" we're never gonna unless we replicate the same logic of the attention economy. perhaps we could perhaps just study sub-cultures -- those that are interested in deep sea and their various ways of talking about it -- and let them speak.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ended up being a book I was in a very specific headspace for, but if you are not interested in looking at the HOW of how information about the deep sea is discussed and disseminated in both popular and scientific culture, this will not be a book for you. This kind of stuff fascinates me deeply, especially because it focuses on the depictions of the deep sea. (Dialectics of art!!) It is a dense read, but a great one, and definitely worth your time when it comes out in May.

[Kyri Freeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This isn't a book of natural history (as I expected based on the description, title, and cover)
I have no idea what it is. Some kind of human-focused symbolic meta-analysis that probably features intersectionality somewhere.
Not for me. YMMV

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid book by Alaimo. Every time I read her work, I always learn something new. I really loved how she talked about deep sea creatures and the way we portray them and their environments. There's definitely a lot to think about here for a while.