Claire Fuller: Polpo fiction
Claire Fuller’s latest novel The Memory of Animals imagines a near-future London paralysed by a devastating pandemic that has wiped out much of the world’s population. The narrator Neffy, a marine biologist with an obsessive interest in cephalopods, is among a band of young, healthy volunteers in a vaccine trial. At the beginning of the...
Communicating evolutions
Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House is an engrossing fictionalised account of a singular episode in modern science. In the mid-1960s, a NASA-funded project led by neuroscientist Dr John Lilly saw naturalist Margaret Howe live in confinement with a dolphin named Peter in a flooded house on St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, to investigate...
Into the lagoon
As soon as her head was under the surface, the dolphins’ noises filled her. Sound, bright as light, hard as touch. Ping-pong balls bouncing down metal stairs. Dolphins are constant vocal innovators, playful geniuses with unspeakable power, the Maria Callases of the sea, their sounds unworldly and pure. A gospel group on helium, hitting the...
