Giant Squid in Popular Culture - Books

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  • Chapter 59 ("Squid") of Moby-Dick details the Pequod's encounter with a giant squid.
  • Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, fights a band of seven giant squid in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In the 1954 film adaptation, there was only one giant squid, which was played by a large prop and served as the film's antagonist.
  • In H. G. Wells "The Sea Raiders", a voracious swarm of giant squids (fictitiously referred to as Haploteuthis ferox) slay a total of eleven people in boats and even attack a man on shore.
  • H. P. Lovecraft frequently used tentacled, squid-like monsters in his Cthulhu mythos.
  • In J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the Fellowship come up against the Watcher in the Water, a monster that lurks in the waters of the Sirannon, beneath the western walls of Moria. Although Tolkien's description is vague, the creature is frequently depicted as a giant squid or kraken with varying (often exaggerated) numbers of tentacles, and appeared as such in the 2001 film.
  • James Bond fights a giant squid in Ian Fleming's book, Dr. No. The scene is absent from the film adaption.
  • John Wyndham's book The Kraken Wakes depicts an invasion of squid-like aliens.
  • Jaws' author Peter Benchley's novel Beast features a giant squid terrorizing Bermuda. A TV movie (IMDB entry) was also made. However Benchley's description of the Beast (with clawlike teeth in the center of its suckers) more accurately describes the Colossal Squid.
  • The River Moth, which flows through author Jeff VanderMeer's fictional city of Ambergris, is inhabited by giant squid. The city is named after ambergris, a substance secreted by sperm whales.
  • The creature used by Ozymandias (comics) in Watchmen resembles the likeness of a squid.
  • A giant squid is a key player in Michael Crichton's novel Sphere, as well as in the film version.
  • A giant squid acts as a minor character in Charles Sheffield's novel The Web Between the Worlds.
  • A giant squid also dwells in the lake at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series of books, and sometimes acts as a lifeguard when students swim or fall in the lake.
  • In Book 27 (The Exposed) of the Animorphs book series, Rachel and Tobias morph sperm whales to find a giant squid, and then the rest of the group morphs the one squid to find the Pemalite ship.
  • Arthur C. Clarke used giant squid in many of his works. In The Deep Range, a squid of exaggerated size is captured and exhibited. In the short story "Big Game Hunt", a device capable of controlling the behavior of invertebrates is used in an attempt to capture and film a giant squid. In Childhood's End, one of the characters stows away on an alien spacecraft by hiding inside a model of a giant squid battling a whale.
  • The giant squid specimen currently housed in the Darwin Centre at London's Natural History Museum forms a key role in the plot of fantasy author China Miéville's 2010 novel Kraken.
  • Many giant squids are mentioned in Tentacles, the sequel to Cryptid Hunters, by Roland Smith. The character of E-Wolf is hired to capture a giant squid for the Northwest Zoo and Aquarium. Smith portrays the squids as pack hunters.
  • A giant squid is mentioned in the book Andrew Lost in the Deep by J. C. Greenburg. It is later confirmed to be a colossal squid
  • John Logan Wright III from CP Coulter's Dalton is often referred to by the fan-base as the "Giant Squid of Ignorance."

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