The Bathysphere Book : Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths

In Brad Fox's retelling the life work of an explorer-scientist becomes a thing of rich poetry, strange imaginings and otherworldly beauty. A wondrous, mesmerising collage of a book, one that celebrates the natural world while pushing up against the tantalising limits of human knowledge and perception - Helen Gordon, author of Notes from Deep Time

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 Miéville, author of 'The City in 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.

Beebe's 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 ocean's 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.

A work of vaulting ambition, wonder, and peerless technique, with startling ideas and insights on every page, The Bathysphere Book is an exhilarating read and one of the best things I've read in years. Its reckoning with ecology - its refusal to ignore the legions of animal life humanity is tangled up in - is shiveringly exciting, important, and new. - Martin MacInnes, author of In Ascension and Infinite Ground