100 Books Like Neptune's Laboratory

This sci-fi romp by an author more famous for space fiction takes an unusual dive into the ocean’s depths, where pole-to-pole zones of plankton cultivation and whale ranching provide food to feed the earth’s enlarged population. Using a typical trope of maritime fiction, Arthur C. Clarke introduces readers to this future world through a neophyte whale warden whose past as a spaceman colors his experiences and perceptions of his new ocean surroundings. Compared with outer space, Clarke’s ocean is fuller of resources, and also more mysterious, but emerges as a place that promises to foster peace and understanding.

This important and revealing book conveys the untold history of West Africans and their relationship with the ocean, including the underwater realm, from before New World slavery and extending around the Atlantic as enslaved African swimmers and divers carried their skills and the culture associated with them in the African diaspora. Kevin Dawson’s story is not only fascinating but also firmly discredits the false and insidious belief that Blacks are naturally poor swimmers and demonstrates instead the long and proud traditions of West African knowledge and use of the undersea.

This fantasy by the prolific and well-known American novelist Theodore Pratt follows the adventures of a bespectacled bookkeeper who becomes a fish, serves the American navy during the Second World War, and swims off to evolve a better species of humanity, free of those qualities that provoked global conflict. Reflecting scientific and popular embrace of the idea that life, including the human species, evolved from the sea, Mr. Limpet combines pointed commentary and humor with the growing cultural fascination of the undersea prompted by submarine warfare. Rare today because of its publication shortly after American entry into the war, the novel inspired the more well-known 1963 film The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

Ann Elias demonstrates how visual media – photography, film, art, and museum displays – re-cast coral reefs in the early 20th century from dangers to navigation into fantastical but familiar and inviting spectacles. Coral Empire reveals photographers, artists, and scientific explorers as they rendered the undersea modern yet colonial. Using technology, indigenous knowledge, and their own visions, they presented the oceans as wild, untouched spaces full of resources that invited exploitation, conquest, and tourism. Desire-fueled uses of the undersea obscured the destructive nature of human activities on coral reefs, now abundantly apparent, while the power of the visual for imagining and knowing the undersea remains.

I love this book as a supplement for the classroom or household library. It is filled with lovely photographs and depicts what is happening to our oceans. There is a nice ratio of text to pictures so as not to be overwhelming. It includes maps, vocabulary words, and a glossary to bring in the educational component without feeling like a textbook. 

Even as an oceanographer myself, I was transfixed and transported by this book. And I loved hearing about the author’s own explorations to the deep. I love the pieces of deepsea exploration history that are in this book; that blew me away, even as someone who has contributed to exploration myself!

I loved the plotlines better than any movie or TV drama, for sure! And not only is the prose thrilling, ethereal, and beautiful, but it has helped me to renew my strength, as a foot soldier in the environmental call to action that is a huge part of this story.

This book is absolutely fascinating. This author makes me wish that I could take her classes. She provides the sweet release of wonder, the gloriousness of the deep sea, the alien, and the mysterious and the magical.

She walks us through the world of the unknown, the struggle of the scientist to try to understand something we can never truly know. She also shatters us with the many ways that we must watch this world disappear, even when we never really knew it existed in the first place. We get a tiny glimpse as humans into the Wild West that is the deep, and yet our impact reaches far beyond our knowledge. We are destroying something so rich and vast it’s akin to outer space.

Break my heart, but keep putting it back together. 

This is an enthralling tale of first-hand research at sea, of perilous work in the ‘screaming 60s’ around Antarctica, and the sheer delight and humility gained from making new discoveries in a world so few have ever seen and where exploration is still in its infancy.

I have experienced exactly that thrill and awe. My own research specialty is the deep ocean–the shape of the seafloor and the stories of sediment swept in to cover it. Alex Rogers is a leading specialist in marine biology, so I was intrigued to read his account of The Deep. Most importantly, Alex explores the ocean’s impact on all our lives, the dramatic effects of our use and abuse of the seas, and of what we might do to mitigate unnecessary damage in the future. Thought-provoking!

I write children’s books because I believe young minds hold the key to saving our troubled oceans. To achieve this, though, we must educate kids and encourage them to take action. This nonfiction book excels at that, inspiring and teaching children to become the next generation of environmental activists.

It is an important book because it explores the five oceans as one interconnected ecosystem, highlighting their critical role in sustaining a livable planet. It goes a step further by explaining actionable steps we can take to help. This message resonates not only with children ages 8 to 12 but with adults, too (and I love that!) The eye-catching illustrations (which, of course, include my dearies, dolphins, and whales) enhance the appeal and engagement for both young readers and educators.

Full disclosure: I still haven’t seen the National Geographic special, but I’ll go down arguing the book is better (much as I do love David Attenborough films). This book is something of a tome, but it’s so engagingly written that it had me up well past my bedtime night after night. 

I’ve always been intrigued by our oceans – one of my first great childhood heroes was Jacques Cousteau – but the true charm of this book is its boundless hope. It would be easy to fall into despair and catastrophization writing a book that deals so intimately with climate change, but instead, there is example after example of people who live as full participants in the cycle of life, not observers of it, whose footsteps beat a path to a world where we all flourish together.