Reframing Our Relationship to Life

Ismael (Richard Basehart) and Queequeg (Friedrich von Ledebur) in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick. “Heathen” Queequeg represented the goodness that Christianity preaches, but seldom obeys in practice.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (1851), is arguably one of the greatest works in literature, and the subject of many critical studies.
One of the clearest interpretations* I’ve found is that Captain Ahab represents the will to dominate the world (above all other considerations), while the white whale represents unpredictable Life.

Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) dies plunging his harpoon into the white whale. Ahab didn’t care about his ship staying sound or the lives of his crew; he only desires revenge. (Does this remind you of a presidential candidate whose name begins with a T?)

Stories in which the creatures of the ocean fight back against humanity are also found among the first science-fiction tales.
In 1870, French author Jules Verne (1828-1905) wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, in which giant squid capsize ships.

1912 book cover of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote the short story “The Sea-Raiders” (1896), about large predatory squid that creep ashore to devour human beings.
In 1936, Karel Čapek (1890-1938) wrote War with the Newts, a novel about intelligent salamanders who win primacy over the earth.
The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham (1953), is the story of entities from beneath the oceans attacking coastal towns, eliminating the glaciers, and sinking vessels.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm (2015), a team of marine biologists are able to communicate with an amoeba-like intelligence that is attacking humankind, and has lived in the oceans for millions of years.
This memorandum compares the last three novels in the above list.

Book cover of Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts.

War with the Newts begins with a Czech seaman Van Toch “discovering” intelligent newts off the coast of Sumatra.
Captain Van Toch finds that the nearly human-sized black salamanders are “teachable” and willing to bring him precious pearls in exchange for human-made tools.
He travels back to Czechia to persuade a businessman (Mr. Bondy) to fund money-making schemes that use the newts.
For the first few years, their company just uses the newts to gather pearls.
(However, that industry merely reaps a 30% profit.)
Unsatisfied with those numbers, the company begins to use the newts for elaborate hydro-engineering projects.
During the next few years, humans become ever more dependent on the newts: as a free labor source, and as consumers for human goods.

Book cover of The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham.

Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes is told from the viewpoint of a married couple (Phyllis and Mike Watson) who are science writers for a British competitor to the BBC.
Another main character is a scientist named Alastair Bocker.
At first, Dr. Bocker believes that humankind can coexist with the beings from the deep, but he later realizes that war is necessary.
The mysterious entities begin to sink ships, and the observation chambers sent to investigate them.
Then, they send gigantic jellyfish-like beings to carry off humans, injuring those that they don’t absorb.
Eventually, the creatures melt the icecaps causing the sea level to rise, so that the earth population is reduced by at least four-fifths.

Original German book cover of Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm.

In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, marine biologists gradually begin to understand that attacks by sea creatures, worms that destabilize the continental shelf, lobsters that spread poison, and swarms of white eyeless crabs are all a connected strategy.
They’re able to communicate with the amoeba-like creatures (controlled by a collective intelligence, the Yrr) that attacked humanity.
The novel concludes with a seeming truce between humankind and the newly-discovered marine life-form.

Čapek’s War with the Newts deals with humanity becoming dependent on sentient beings that it considers “inferior.”
However, the “subservient” amphibians become the primary power on the planet, as they remake the globe to match their own needs.
In The Kraken Wakes, an intelligence comes from the stars, and proceeds to remolding the earth as its’ new watery habitat.
(In both novels, the battle isn’t so much a war against humankind, as gentrification.)
In The Swarm, the goal of the “hive mind” may be to increase ocean area, but its’ other goal is likely to stop humanity from harming the ocean ecosystems. 

Book cover of Out of the Deeps, the American (heavily-edited and shortened by one chapter) version of The Kraken Wakes.

Motivations aside, the actions of the creatures are similar.
The newts create earthquakes which result in tidal waves, causing great loss of human life, and many more livable shorelines for the salamanders.
The alien creatures, in The Kraken Wakes, melt the polar ice caps raising the sea level by 120 feet, thereby killing and displacing millions of humans.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, worms (created by the amoeba-like Yrr) destabilize the continental shelf, causing a massive tsunami, again killing millions.

One quality that the three novels share with Moby Dick is a dark view of human behavior.
In one segment of Čapek’s The War with the Newts, a German newspaper proposes that “because of its German environment that this [the German] newt had developed into a different and superior sub-species, indisputably above the level of any other salamander.”
The Kraken Wakes also points out human defects: the ridiculous infighting as human governments drop nuclear bombs willy-nilly, blame each other, and fail to cooperate against the deep-sea menace.
The Swarm finds comic qualities in the grotesque, nativist belief systems of U.S. government officials.

All three of the science-fiction novels deal to some extent with religion.
In War with the Newts, humankind’s cruelty to sentient creatures is on constant display.
(American Black ministers are among the few that show any compassion toward the enslaved newts.)
In The Kraken Wakes, Mike Watson (speaking of humanity and the creatures in the Deep) tells his wife: “We can’t both inherit the earth.”
In The Swarm, religious groups are thrown into chaos by the concept that humans aren’t the primary life-form on the planet.
(In the epilogue, a Catholic bishop sprinkles “the waves with holy water and ordering the devils to depart.”)

The Swarm is more driven by ideas on ecology than either War with the Newts or The Kraken Wakes.
In the earlier novels, the salamanders and the alien entities (that arrive on earth via fireballs) wish to remake the earth, to make it a better home for their species.
However, the hive mind in The Swarm—by sinking and disabling ships, disrupting deep sea cables, and starting epidemics—seems set on saving the marine ecosystem from humanity.
Only when the Yrr realizes that it may have some commonality with humankind, does it stop its’ onslaught. 

Although many passages in the Bible preach that humanity should live peacefully with nature, people seem most impressed by the line in Genesis 1:26 about humankind having “dominion.”
Most ignore Genesis 9:1-19 in which Noah promises God that he, and his progeny, will become good stewards for “every beast of the earth.”
U.S. history shows that although the first stewards of the North American continent—the 600 Native American tribes—wanted to live in harmony with nature, the conquering (European Christian) worldview was to use the earth as a wealth source: killing beavers and bison to extinction, searching for gold and other minerals, creating havoc in ecosystems.

According to an article in Hakai (hakaimagazine.com), and reprinted in Smithsonian Magazine, humans “kill, collect or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species, mostly for nonfood reasons.”
According to Dr. Andrea Reid (a scientist quoted in *”Humans Take Out More Wild Species Than Any Other Predator on Earth”) “if we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.”

*War in Melville’s Imagination, by Joyce Sparer Adler, The Gotham Library, 1981, pages 55-78.

Pink Flamingos and White Eyeless Crabs

Babs Johnson (Divine) outside her trailer with pink flamingo lawn ornaments in Pink Flamingos.

The above title isn’t a reference to the 1972 John Waters film Pink Flamingos.
Instead, the title comes from a long-ago discussion, when I was fifteen.
I was walking (in a Michigan neighborhood) with a German foreign exchange student.
We passed by a front yard bedecked with pink flamingo* lawn ornaments, when my new friend commented that this was the way she expected all American homes to look.
I got it.
She expected all Americans to be vulgar, ignorant and low-class.
It’s just the way Europeans thought of the U.S.A.
(I tried not to take it personally.)

This memorandum compares the 2006 English translation of the German eco-thriller The Swarm, to the 8-part mini-series (based on the novel), which aired on European TV in March of 2023, and in the U.S. on CW (sadly, the lowest-rated American network).
A future memorandum will deal with science-fiction novels that deal with humankind’s relationship with nature, and the oceans.

The Swarm deals with humanity destroying the oceans—dumping radioactive and industrial waste; laying down deep sea cables with magnetic fields (that interfere with the homing instincts of salmon and eels); and laying waste to ecosystems and coral reefs.
As the result of this activity, entities in the oceans begin to fight back.
Although the novel is science-fiction, and not a scientific book, most critics say The Swarm presents marine biology and geology very accurately.

Board game for The Swarm.

The Swarm novel sold over 4.5 million copies and has been translated into 18 languages.
The mini-series has an international cast, and the mini-series was the most expensive German TV show ever made.
There’s also a popular strategy board game, based on the novel, in which each player sends scientists to confront the ecological catastrophes.

Frank Schätzing, creator of the novel, is of the same generation as the German exchange student I knew in the late 1960s.
In his novel, the U.S. President talks about the “ridiculous little countries” of the U.N., and says that “God’s still holding His protective hand over the West.”
CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt wears “a bright yellow T-shirt bearing the words ‘Kiss me, I’m a Prince,’ stretched over his expansive belly,” when he greets a team of scientists.
The U.S. Defense Secretary arrogantly says to the President: “We are the free world. Europe is part of the American free world.”
(Most of the American government officials featured in the novel are hyper-nationalistic jerks.)

While the basic plots are the same, scientists versus a higher intelligence—that’s existed in the oceans for millions of years—a lot of material couldn’t be used from the 881-page novel.
Some characters (Norwegian biologist Sigur Johanson, American astrophysicist Samantha Crowe, and Canadian biologist Leon Anawak) carry over from the novel, but they’re altered, both in appearance (age and ethnicity) and in personality.
New characters were created, and the novel’s main American villains—General Judith Li, and CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt—are completely erased from the mini-series plot (probably, because of misguided hopes for reaching the “American market.”)

Scientist Sigur Johanson (Alexander Karim) in the mini-series The Swarm.

At the beginnings of both versions of The Swarm, we’re introduced to several scientists as they begin to realize that a superior intelligence exists deep in the oceans, and is moving against humanity.
Whales overturn ships, and millions of white eyeless crabs invade the shorelines.
A species of marine worm (with teeth) destabilizes the continental shelf, causing a tsunami that kills millions in Northern Europe.
Eventually, some of the scientists are united on a big ship, and attempt to communicate with the intelligence (named the Yrr by Dr. Johanson).
In the novel, the scientists unite on a gigantic U.S. Navy ship.
In the mini-series, a Japanese industrialist finances the mission.

Despite calling out many countries (including Germany) for their non-ecological methods, the novelist does focus, in a few instances, on American actions.
According to one section on the Vietnam War dolphin experiments, the U.S. Navy created a:

Swimmer Nullification Program. . .Those animals were trained to tug at divers’ masks and flippers and disconnect their air-supply. . . The navy strapped hypodermic needles to their beaks and the dolphins were ordered to ram the divers. . . Our animals killed over forty Vietcong and two of our own guys by mistake.

While I’ve read that the U.S. Navy did use dolphins to blow up ships during the Vietnam War, the idea of dolphins being turned into “killing machines” is a bit hard to accept.

A beached orca in the mini-series The Swarm. Its’ brain has been tampered with by the Yrr.

Another sequence deals with the U.S. Navy Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS), and how its’ brain-damaging sonar makes whales beach themselves.
(“Evidently the Americans couldn’t pass up on the opportunity of putting 80% of the world’s oceans under surveillance,” says a Canadian character in the novel.)
However, the U.S. already has plenty to feel guilty about in terms of polluting the oceans with DDT, nuclear waste, and chemicals (in case you’ve never read Rachel Carson’s 1962 science book Silent Spring).

In the novel, the first “physical” interaction with the Yrr occurs when dolphins return to the ship hanger with Yrr and murderous orcas.
Alicia Delaware, and other crew members, die gruesomely, and she’s taken over zombie-style.

Mini-series episode 7 is far less violent than the novel.
In it, after oceanographer Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch) and a robotics expert return to the ship in a submersible, they unknowingly bring the Yrr along.
Later, Alicia Delaware (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers) is alone in the hanger, when she spots a strange glowing form in the water.
The Yrr hijack her nervous system (just as it took over sperm whales, orcas, lobsters, and crabs).
Delaware is the Yrr’s first human experiment, and rather than becoming a zombie, she goes into a coma.

The final chapters of the novel involve the heroes fighting (action-movie style) with part of the U.S. Government.
Aware that destruction of the Yrr might end in earth’s extinction, the scientists hope for co-existence.
However, the American officials just want to eradicate the Yrr. . . no matter the consequences!
(In an attempt to implement their plan, Li and Vanderbilt kill many of the hero-scientists.)

The cover of a new American edition of The Swarm.

The novel ends with the big ship going down, and journalist Karen Weaver traveling down 3,466 meters in a submersible and dropping off a corpse (full of pheromones), for the Yrr to examine.
Only a few scientists and crew members survive the sinking.
Canadian biologist Leon Anawak rescues Karen Weaver from the water in a helicopter.
A year-later, an epilogue reveals that the nations of the earth are slowly recovering from the tsunamis and the Yrr-created pathogens.
We don’t learn much about the Yrr, but they do give surface creatures a reprieve.
However, at the point that the novel ends, humankind has gone into in a deep funk over its’ “loss of primacy,” and armed conflicts are spreading across the globe.

The mini-series ending is not quite as dark as the end of the novel.
Episode 8 concludes with oceanographer Charlie Wagner traveling deep in the submersible (to show “good faith” to the Yrr?), communing with them/it, and (strangely) washing up alive on shore.
Even a comatose Alicia Delaware seems to survive!
Since the last episode was listed as a season finale, and not a series finale, there’s the possibility of a second season.

In Frogs,  millionaire Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) represents those who want to “use up” the earth’s resources, and nature photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) represents those who respect the environment.

Putting The Swarm into context, it’s in the tradition of eco-thrillers. The 1968 Japanese film Genocide, also released as War of the Insects, tells of insects attacking humanity because of humanity's nuclear threat.
(Brave scientists battle the unreasoning American military in that film, as well.)
In 1972’s Frogs, reptiles, insects and amphibians stalk rich patriarch Jason Crockett after he uses poisons against creatures on his estate.
In Phase IV, ants (taken over by a superior intelligence from outer space) wage war against humankind in the American desert. 

Phase IV was released in 1974 with a truncated ending. The “real” ending (“discovered” in 2012) shows people merging with the ants, and a new species being formed. (Paramount found that ending too disturbing to use in the initial release.)

*According to the Wikipedia article on pink flamingos, some U.S. homeowner associations forbid the placement of these lawn ornaments because they lower real estate values.