Stories of underwater exploration date back to at least the early 1600s.

Most have focused on the discovery of submerged cities or the lost continent of Atlantis. The advent of submarine warfare in World War I inspired realistic tales of beneath-the-seas adventure, and World War II inspired many motion pictures that portrayed daring Americans sneaking into German and Japanese-held waters to wreak havoc on the enemy. Herbert borrows from the underwater melodramas of World War II and from fantasies of futuristic underwater explorations such as Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). In The Dragon in the Sea, he tempers his imaginings with the hard-edged tone of typical war submarine stories, and thus creates a more realistic atmosphere. The Dragon in the Sea is one of the earliest science fiction novels to emphasize the problems advanced technology would pose for submarines in the future, making...