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The Kraken Wakes / Out of the Deeps

In the beginning of John Wyndham’s Out of the Deeps, mysterious red shooting stars are seen over the ocean, all around the world. While a few people write up their sightings, and a few papers publish then, the general feeling is that these are crackpots claiming to see UFOs. The narrator. Mike, and his wife, Phil, think this is a neat thing to see on their honeymoon cruise, and note that all the other sightings took place by the ocean, too.

But the real story is about something that now lives under the sea. We don’t see the creatures for ages, which works well for me because it’s much scarier (and less gross) to just see the aftermath of something destroying undersea probes, ships, or coastal villages.

The whole idea of a mysterious life under the ocean, something else intelligent and living on our planet, but where we can’t go, makes such an intriguing story. I really liked the story thread about the octopus world in Arthur Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth, to the point that I used Thalassa (the world from that book, named from the ancient Greek) as the working title of my last game, eventually called Undersea Explorers. I also added a mysterious kraken for the marine biologists in the game to investigate.

I wasn’t immediately interested in The Kraken Wakes/Out of the Deeps because I worried it might be gross, and you know I prefer my fiction 100% gore-free. I needn’t have worried, though, despite an incredibly high body count, it’s not a gross novel at all. Overall, I think Wyndham’s just not a gory writer, even when his stories are full of danger and creepy events. Besides, the main characters stiff-upper-lip their way through the deaths, mysteries, flooding and rioting.

Relatively early in the disaster, a scientist, Bocher, notes that the sea levels are about 2 inches above usual. But, just like in real life, an inch doesn’t seem like very much, and the non-reaction to this now-familiar data point felt extra creepy. Bocher also notices that the melting of the polar ice caps will keep the sea rising and affect all the nature cycles. (Wyndham explains iceberg calving, because he’s writing for an audience that isn’t already familiar with this on the news.) Bocher’s more interested in being right than in being friendly and palatable, which is one of my favorite scientist tropes in fiction, and unpleasantly relatable today.

Now, I happened to read The Kraken Wakes during a heat wave, when we lost power, and I do not really recommend reading an old specfic novel about climate change catastrophe as climate change grinds infrastructure to a halt. Seriously, I read this as the room got progressively hotter and darker without electricity, and you guys, that is not the way to read a climate change disaster story.

The Kraken Wakes is the UK version, and it’s published as Out of the Deeps in the USA. The two editions have different beginnings and slightly different endings. There’s an additional opening scene in the British version that’s a conversation between Phil and Mike setting up why he wants to write this book. It’s nice but not really necessary to develop the characters or explain why the book exists, I thought the shipboard scenes set up the relationship and the situation perfectly. Both versions end with the same news and resolution, but I also preferred the US ending, which has their old friend Bocher turning back up, instead of a random messenger. Seeing a friend after isolation is a more satisfying resolution for Mike and Phil, and it’s a good ending for Bocher, still stomping through the apocalypse, still unbothered by other humans and their opinions. Worth tracking down both versions, though.

In both editions, this is listed as his second novel (after Day of the Triffids), but really he’d also written and published The Secret People under a different pen name before this. Triffids and Kraken are MUCH better Secret People, so I kind of see why he wanted to separate them from his earlier fiction.

I read a criticism of John Wyndham’s work that calls his disaster scifi “cozy catastrophes”. Margaret Atwood already rebutted that way better than I could, saying “These books of his have been called “cozy catastrophes,” as the pair-bonded central figures make it through and then set up a fireside-and-slippers new beginning, but one might as well call World War II—of which Wyndham was a veteran—a “cozy” war because not everyone died in it.” Overall, scifi is a genre with very few women, and when we do get a female character, she’s often a sexy damsel in distress. I appreciate how in Wyndham’s stories, the female lead characters are usually pretty and good at things. You get the feeling that the protagonists actually like their wives, too, and remember that there were written decades ago, in a time of much more wife-bashing comedy.

Atwood, Margaret. “Chocky, the Kindly Body Snatcher.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 8 Sept. 2015, slate.com/culture/2015/09/margaret-atwood-chocky-the-kindly-alien-invader-in-john-wyndhams-last-book.html.

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Steve Tracey says:

July 22, 2025 at 10:02 am

Thanks for the update - your earlier reviews of John Wyndham's work are probably why I recently listened to a BBC sound production of The Kraken Wakes. I particularly enjoyed the slithery bits, with Lovecraftian tentacles coming up to snatch people off the beaches. The piece had good suspense but no gore beyond some squelching noises.