'' by author
Jules Verne •
Alfred Tennyson 1830 irregular
sonnet The Kraken, which described a massive creature that dwelled at the bottom of the sea. • In
Herman Melville's 1851 novel
Moby Dick (chapter 59) the crew of the Pequod encounter a "vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length". Starbuck calls it 'The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.' Narrator
Ishmael attributes this to Bishop
Pontoppidan's "the great Kraken," and concludes: "By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of
cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the
Anak of the tribe." • In
Victor Hugo's 1866 novel
Toilers of the Sea, Gilliatt kills a giant octopus with a knife. "This monster is the creature that seamen call the octopus, scientists call a cephalopod, and which in legend is known as a kraken." •
Jules Verne's 1870 novel
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas mentions the Kraken and features a group of
giant squids that attack the
submarine Nautilus. • In
Anatole France's 1908 novel ''
L'île des Pingouins'' (chapter V), Kraken is the name of a character that plays a monster, depicted as, among others, a dragon. •
H. P. Lovecraft's novel
The Call of Cthulhu, written in 1926, according to
Cthulhu Mythos scholar
Robert M. Price, has been inspired by
Alfred Tennyson's sonnet. Both reference a huge aquatic creature sleeping for an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age. •
John Wyndham's 1953 novel
The Kraken Wakes features the
sonnet written by
Alfred Tennyson called
The Kraken (1830), which described a massive creature that dwelled at the bottom of the sea; the story itself refers to an invasion by sea-dwelling aliens. The title is a play on Tennyson's line "The Kraken sleepeth". •
Jack Vance's 1966 science fiction adventure novel
The Blue World, based on an earlier 1964
novella The Kragen, depicts a world where natives must beware the kragen, giant, semi-intelligent squid-like predators which roam the ocean. • In
Richard Adams' 1980 novel
The Girl in a Swing, the main female character is stalked by the Kraken to punish her for the crime of murder by drowning. •
Terry Brooks' 1985 novel
The Wishsong of Shannara features a Kraken as a giant sea creature summoned by "dark magic" to join an assault on a
Dwarf fortress. • In the children's book
Monster Mission (also known as
Island of the Aunts) by
Eva Ibbotson, the Kraken is a force for good who has the ability to clean and heal the oceans. • Kraken appear in
Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox as enormous, peaceful creatures that stay in the same spot for centuries feeding on
algae, doubling as islands. They are described as being conical in shape, although there is a tubular shaped one on the coast of
Ireland. In this book, Kraken shed their shells explosively, igniting a layer of
methane under the old one and sending it flying. A comparison is made between the Kraken, and a
barnacle (albeit one big enough to be mistaken for an island). • In
Michael Crichton's posthumous 2009 novel
Pirate Latitudes the sailors call the large sea creature that terrorizes the protagonist's ship "the kraken". •
China Miéville's 2010 novel
Kraken features a cult devoted to the worship of the creature. ==Music==