55 pages • 1 hour read
Daughter of the Deep
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Background
Literary Context: Retrofuturism
Daughter of the Deep is heavily influenced by retrofuturism, which is a literary and artistic movement that focuses on past (retro) depictions of the future. While science fiction is a genre that explores imagined futures, retrofuturism is the incorporation of old ideas about what the future might involve and building on them from a contemporary point of view. The most common subgenre of retrofuturism is steampunk, as in the 2001 Disney animated movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire. In the film, the protagonist travels on an advanced, steam-powered submarine that is closer to what people in 1914 imagined for the future than it is to present-day advanced submarine technology. This technology is similar in concept to the “alt-tech” in Daughter of the Deep. Riordan’s alt-tech owes a literary debt to the futuristic vision of Jules Verne, who lived during the time of 19th-century steam-powered technology.
The Nautilus, a submarine that appears first in Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and later in The Mysterious Island, is not steam-powered; it is propelled by electricity, which is generated from sea salt and coal. However, the depiction of the Nautilus in the famous 1954 Disney film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is a prototypical steampunk film, shows an aesthetic heavily influenced by Victorian technology. This depiction remains in the popular cultural imagination of Nemo’s submarine, and it can also be seen in the illustration of the Nautilus depicted on the last page of the 2021 hardcover edition of Daughter of the Deep.
Futurism is a literary and artistic response to the sudden technological boom beginning in the 19th and 20th centuries. The movement allowed authors and artists to explore worlds that were natural extensions of the ever-increasing technological innovations of the period. Futurism allowed people to imagine what life might be like when technology could solve their problems, rejecting the nostalgia of Romanticism and instead glorifying the future. Retrofuturism, on the other hand, looks to the past and considers how things might have been done differently. It is a nostalgic genre, a way for artists to look back on the hopes of the pasts and consider realities parallel to our own.
Historical Context: Indian Rebellion of 1857
Ana Dakkar, protagonist of Daughter of the Deep, embraces her Bundeli Indian heritage throughout the novel. Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, a direct ancestor of Ana in Daughter of the Deep, is the former Prince Dakkar, son of one of the raja (kings) of India. In Verne’s novels, Nemo roams the sea in the Nautilus because of his anger and hatred for the British rule in India. In Daughter of the Deep, Riordan writes Prince Dakkar as a man whose wife and oldest son the British killed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. During this rebellion—which is known also as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, and the First War of Independence—Indian troops (sepoys) rebelled against the English East India Company. The East India Company took control of much of the Indian subcontinent in order to control trade in the region.
To maintain power, the East India Company kept their own armed forces. In 1857, long-standing religious conflict came to a head over a new type of musket cartridge that contained beef tallow, which is offensive to Hindus, and pork lard, which is offensive to Muslims. Indian soldiers in various locations, but particularly in northern India, refused to use the muskets and mutinied. This led to a much larger-scale and very bloody conflict for over a year, ending with the dissolution of the East India Company, with the British government stepping in to take direct control of India. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was an important moment in India’s long struggle against colonial British power, which officially remained in place until the partition of British India into two independent political states—India and Pakistan—in 1947. The rebellion is therefore a major part of modern Indian history and identity and an important part of Ana Dakkar’s heritage in Daughter of the Deep.
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By Rick Riordan
