Author’s Notes: The Stolen Kraken
1955 was a pretty amazing year. Martin Luther King, Jr. earned his Ph.D during this year. The birth of rock & roll was in full swing. Marty McFly appeared in Hill Valley, CA, rocked out, and disappeared in a bolt of li… oh wait, that’s a movie. Darn. Well, even so, for years in the 1950s to choose to set a historical adventure in, 1955 was pretty much perfect. The juxtaposition of a satisfied sense of national pride with simmering conflict over long-running racial disparities leads to this being a time where it’s almost inevitable that something consequential will happen.
The story I had in the original draft was much more of a straight adventure tale; it didn’t feature baseball (my second favorite sport) or Dr. King at all. It was a fun outline… but didn’t have much to do with the 1950s other than being set during that decade. Sometimes, your first draft just has to get tossed on the file. No story outline is ever truly gone; elements continue forward even when you need to rewrite.
In spite of the rewrite, this story was much simpler in some respects than Vampire; my process on the books was starting to gel and while I had to rewrite and refocus, many of the elements of the original at least managed to hang around in the rewrite.
Dr. King and the integration of baseball are especially important now in the era of Black Lives Matter; we can see that while society has pressed toward Dr. King’s dream, we have a long way to go. The choice of Boston for my city in the story was in some ways fortunate and in some ways sobering. The Boston Red Sox were the last Major League Baseball team to integrate; they waited until 1959 to promote their first Black minor leaguer, utility infielder Pumpsie Green (twelve years after Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers), and even then did so resentfully.
The first challenge of writing the Kraken into this story was making sure that the creature was effectively intelligent without being able to directly communicate with the humans in the story. The second was to give my scientist character an understandable motivation. A groundbreaking discovery in marine science would absolutely make any scientist’s career - especially the discovery of a new species of marine megafauna that had never been seen before.
On a more serious note, the Earth’s oceans are the basis of life on the planet. We need to protect them and restore them.
There wasn’t any page room for a dedication, but this volume is in fact dedicated to 826 MSP (formerly known as Mid-Continent Oceanographic Institute), and the city of Boston.
