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Atlantis Is Boring: Difference between revisions
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* ''[[Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea]]'' by Jules Verne. It's a product of its time and reads like one, but even a mid- to late-19th century novel should be called up on the carpet for including paragraph upon paragraph of the names of exotic sea creatures and plants with only occasional description. If ever there was justification for '''not''' paying authors by the word, this would be it:
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** But he did more or less avert the trope with battles with sharks, forests of seaweed and other adventures under the ocean.
** ''All'' of the ''Les Voyages Extraordinaires'' are written like that though, ''Five Weeks in a Balloon'' was rejected for being "too scientific". What Hetzel published ''was'' toned down.
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* L. Frank Baum's [[Needs More Love|underappreciated]] children's novel ''The Sea Fairies'' deals with a young girl and her [[Cool Old Guy|crusty seacaptain friend]] being temporarily transformed into the titular mermaids/mermen. They tour the queen's kingdom, meet all kinds of magical sea creatures, and end up captured by an evil sorcerer. This is actually the dominant plot of the book, so despite its scientific inaccuracy there's a lot of interesting things that happen.
* ''Amphibian Man'' by Russian SF author Alexander Beliaev, gives a breathtaking poetic account of undersea beauty as experienced by a young man with gills, which naturally force him to spend most of his life in the ocean. Beliaev, who was paralyzed and ill for much of his life, had nothing but his imagination to take him to incredible places, and he clearly put a lot of thought into a picture of the young man's underwater environment, a cavern that he furnishes with seashells, pearls, and various plant life.
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* One scene in the [[Book of Amber|Nine Princes In Amber]] books sees the characters going into a Castlevania-style inverse version of their own castle, which goes even further than most inverse castles by being under water. They initially go with [[Walk, Don't Swim]] (and they can breathe, for some reason), but eventually one of the characters gets sick of a particularly long spiral stair and swims down the bottom.
* The trope is analysed to some extent in [[The Chronicles of Narnia|The Voyager of the Dawn Treader]], when Lucy observes some mermen on the sea floor and reflects that human concepts do not apply directly to the sea and some are inverted--for example, the safe, homely places are on the tops of 'mountains', nearest the surface, while heroes go to fight monsters in the dark, dangerous 'valleys' where the sea is deepest.
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