Fans pick 100 books like Coral Empire

This sci-fi romp by an author more famous for space fiction takes an unusual dive into the ocean’s depths, where pole-to-pole zones of plankton cultivation and whale ranching provide food to feed the earth’s enlarged population. Using a typical trope of maritime fiction, Arthur C. Clarke introduces readers to this future world through a neophyte whale warden whose past as a spaceman colors his experiences and perceptions of his new ocean surroundings. Compared with outer space, Clarke’s ocean is fuller of resources, and also more mysterious, but emerges as a place that promises to foster peace and understanding.

The title Neptune’s Laboratory invokes knowledge of the oceans through science alongside the equally central role imagination has played in the human relationship with the sea. Antony Adler astutely observes how its mirror-like qualities encouraged scientists, politicians, and the public since the early 19th century to use the ocean to spin utopian fantasies and explore dystopian fears. Most importantly, he reminds readers that our propensity to fathom oceans to project the fate of the human species and our planet offers an important key: imagination could chart a course toward a better future.

This important and revealing book conveys the untold history of West Africans and their relationship with the ocean, including the underwater realm, from before New World slavery and extending around the Atlantic as enslaved African swimmers and divers carried their skills and the culture associated with them in the African diaspora. Kevin Dawson’s story is not only fascinating but also firmly discredits the false and insidious belief that Blacks are naturally poor swimmers and demonstrates instead the long and proud traditions of West African knowledge and use of the undersea.

This fantasy by the prolific and well-known American novelist Theodore Pratt follows the adventures of a bespectacled bookkeeper who becomes a fish, serves the American navy during the Second World War, and swims off to evolve a better species of humanity, free of those qualities that provoked global conflict. Reflecting scientific and popular embrace of the idea that life, including the human species, evolved from the sea, Mr. Limpet combines pointed commentary and humor with the growing cultural fascination of the undersea prompted by submarine warfare. Rare today because of its publication shortly after American entry into the war, the novel inspired the more well-known 1963 film The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

Dr. John E.N. Veron, called Charlie by everyone who knows him, is an Australian coral reef scientist. He is also the person who single-handedly sorted out the names of the corals in the 1980s by emphasizing the study of corals in their natural habitats on reefs. Prior taxonomy, based on dried, cleaned bits of skeletons, had resulted in much confusion given the considerable plasticity of the form of corals growing in different reef habitats. This book is Charlie’s account of his life as a marine scientist, from his earliest exploring of rocky shores near Sydney to his numerous expeditions to reefs around the world over the course of his career. 

His love of the natural world, his curiosity and willingness to take risks, and his dogged determination in solving scientific puzzles stand out. So too do his humor, his down-to-earth Australian-ness, and his loving respect for corals, for reefs, and… show more.

That’s right: that Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of the Species. Seventeen years before that ground-shaking book, he wrote what marine scientists tell me remains the definitive work on the structure of coral reefs. Forget the famous Punch caricature of the gray-haired man trailing a long beard and a chimpanzee and think of the youthful naturalist daring crashing waves to vault to the edge of a South Pacific fringe reef. In places his accounts read like True Adventures for Boys.   

The relationship between ourselves and the sea is commonly constrained by beaches and tides. But Julia Whitty, deep-sea diver, and filmmaker opens the mind to the richness of deep waters through the scientific and soulful journeys she poetically shares in this book. Her time spent working in the South Pacific allows an expansion of our own experiences of the wild world. The delicate relationships of life’s many forms, from whales and sharks to rays and coral, contained within Earth’s liquid artistry, offers an opportunity to enrich our understanding of connections we seldom perceive but which, once acknowledged, expand the perception of life’s wealth.

Snorkeling in a Hawaiian reef took on new dimensions for me in reading this book. Johannes–a noted fisheries biologist–went to Palau in Micronesia to study the breeding biology of tropical reef fishes. There, he came to deeply appreciate the extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the local subsistence fishermen who had contributed to his research. Their expert knowledge of the behavior and breeding cycles of local reef fishes was hard-earned through a lifetime of careful observation in pursuit of their livelihood.

By contrast, the expert knowledge of Johannes and his academic colleagues was broad but shallow. Combining Indigenous and academic expertise enhanced both. We also learn how Palauan communities conserved the resources of their reefs, practices disrupted by colonial administrations.

There’s a line near the beginning of Berwald’s book where she mentions that jellyfish came into her life “when the haze of sleepless nights” brought on by early parenthood had begun to lift, and she was beginning to once again have an existence beyond parenting. What follows is a chronicle of Berwald’s deep dive into all the fascinating aspects of her new passion and the people and places she experienced because of it.

I read this book while I was living in that very haze, and enjoyed both following Berwald’s adventures and imagining those that I’d have once my haze had lifted.

Not a book written by a coral reef biologist, this is a book by a non-scientist about how coral reef scientists cope with the knowledge that our degradation of reef ecosystems around the world is close to terminal. Our impacts on reefs, through climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, pollution, and many other forms of local disrespect have been going on ever since reef research really took off in the early 1960s, following the invention of SCUBA by Jacques Cousteau. Irus Braverman learned to dive in 1989 when she lived in Israel; the first reefs she saw were in the Red Sea. She loved diving, but it was only much later, 2015, when she began to wonder about what was happening to reefs, and how that might affect the scientists who have devoted their lives to exploring these captivating places. 

A series of interviews and some travel to reefs provided the… show more.