Leviathan

By Samuel Pérez García

After the shocking announcement of a giant sea creature discovered in the Atlantic, the entire world is left to wonder: is this a sign of the end of times, or just a harmless giant creature about to awaken? With the countdown winding down, the world prepares... and waits for what's to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samuel Pérez García
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310032899

Samuel Pérez García

Ever since I remember I have loved books. My mother... excuse me, Santa Claus and the Three Magic Kings used to give me classic books for the holidays, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Treasure Island, Starship Troopers, etc. Some were books I adored, others (Starship Troopers) I didn’t bother to read until way later, when I was at college... and also loved. However, it wasn’t until a New York trip in which my cousin lent me his copy of Jurassic Park (the movie hit theaters that summer, and he wanted me to read it before we went to see Spielberg’s take) that I began my fandom literary stage, beginning with Michael Crichton.A few years later, I decided to take on writing.So here I am, at the beginning of the 21st century, using the tools that communications technology places in our hands, tools that now allow every person on the planet with an internet connection instant visibility with thousands others. Not exactly the future of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 (or even Zemeckis’ Back to the Future II‘s), but a pretty cool one. And one with enormous potential.

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LEVIATHAN

Samuel Pérez García

Copyright © 2011 Samuel Pérez García (Original Spanish text)

English translation by Samuel Pérez García (2014)

Cover art The Destruction of Leviathan, by Gustave Doré (1865)

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Excerpts from Out from the Deeps: How the Leviathan Came Back to Life, title of the January 2016 special edition of National Geographic; preface written by David Palmer, member of Team Leviathan on board the Ron Brown; other excerpts by Víctor Vega, Oleg Blonsky and Alan Cummings.

PREFACE: HC SVNT DRACONES

By David Palmer

IT WAS BARELY 4 A.M. and already Dr. Marlow was barking orders, urging his team to action as if getting ready for a naval battle. We were onboard the NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown, ready to be part of one of the greatest days in the history of zoology. It came as no surprise that Marlow - who hadn't slept for twenty two hours, and wouldn't for the next twenty either - acted the army sergeant; his performance in that historic September 29, 2008 would place his name among the greats of zoology, and the greatest of the greats of cryptozoology, and such was the pressure he felt. In just a few hours we would send to the depths of the Atlantic the Orpheus, a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle specially equipped for this unique mission: take the first scientific measurements of the now famous Leviathan.

I’ll never forget that day, when at thirty two I became a child once again.

I was born and raised in the town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, among tales of the sea that mingled reality with fantasy and which easily stimulated my very impressionable imagination. I dreamed of being a sailor and escaping some day to have all sorts of adventures, heading towards those regions that ancient maps, not knowing what to make of those parts, marked with a HC SVNT DRACONES: here there be dragons. However, at fifteen I finally came to terms with reality, one that denied the existence of such a fantastic world, and the life of a sailor - without killer whales to hunt or foreign lands to discover - was not exactly my cup of tea. By that time, however, the sea had left too deep a mark on me, and my fate was forged by a new but similar passion: marine biology.

It was that same fate that steered me to cross paths with Dr. James Marlow. Like me, he was a dreamer swept away by the mysteries of the deeps. We know more of outer space than of our own oceans, he told me once. The ocean deeps are our last great frontier on Earth, the end of exploration and adventure on our planet. It was that adventurous spirit what attracted me about Marlow; next to him you felt that everything was possible, and that everything amazingly possible was just waiting to be uncovered. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he studied under Dr. Karl Shuker, the worldwide famous cryptozoologist. Cryptozoology - the search for and study