Tessa Yang grew up loving Jaws, but there’s one thing that bothers her about the quintessential shark attack movie: It thoroughly villainized its subject. 

To Yang, Jaws is a fun monster flick. But for many viewers, it became a reason to hate and fear a group of animals that humans long considered harmless, and that play essential roles in Earth’s ocean ecosystems. (Our ancestors’ instincts were correct: You’re far more likely to die on the toilet than in the maw of a hungry shark.)

So Yang set about writing a different kind of sea monster story, one where the protagonist is not a harpoon-toting police chief, but a scientist who has spent her life studying the creatures at the center of the drama—in this case, jellyfish. When locals on the remote Maine island of Shattering Point turn to marine biologist Jo Ness for help killing the mega medusa that skulks local shorelines, the jellyfish expert decides to find another solution, by learning everything she can about the creature.

The result is a very different sort of monster tale, one that plays with the tension between human needs and the natural world without asserting that one is dominant over the other. Also in tension are the novel’s paranormal elements—at times The Jellyfish Problem gives off vibes of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy—and the scientific content about jellyfish, of which there is no shortage. Yang wasn’t always a jellyfish fan, but when she decided to place one at the center of her story, she researched the creatures thoroughly in order to do them justice. Ness, she says, would have been disappointed otherwise.

As the mystery of Shattering Point’s giant jelly unspools, it is hard not to become concerned with the animal’s welfare, and the well-being of jellyfish worldwide. If you’ve only ever thought of jellyfish as beach pests, this book will give you a deeper appreciation of their alien beauty and thalassic mystery. And, perhaps, a healthy fear of cave diving.

The Science of Fiction caught up with Yang recently to discuss jellies, Jaws, our shared phobia of deep dark water, and how to write an ecologically responsible sea monster story. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Maddie Stone:  What made you decide you wanted your first novel to focus on jellyfish? 

Tessa Yang: Prior to writing this book, I had probably not thought about jellyfish for ten consecutive seconds in my whole life. I really set out wanting to write a sea monster story that was inspired by my love of the movie Jaws. But I knew I couldn't do sharks, because they've been done a lot. Also, I love sharks and I didn't want to turn sharks into work. So then I was casting about for what I wanted my monster to be, and that's where research came into play. In the beginning I was more or less googling weird ocean animals, because I wanted something real to base my monster off. And I found my way to a cool video posted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute on YouTube of these animals called giant siphonophores, which I'd never heard of before, and are technically not jellyfish, but are jellyfish-like. I was very enchanted by these animals, wanted to learn a lot about them, and that led me down a jelly fish-shaped rabbit hole.

Maddie:  And as you went down that jellyfish-shaped rabbit hole, did you speak to experts or read papers? What did your research process look like? 

Tessa : It was pretty broad in the beginning. I read books. Probably one of the most influential was Spineless by Juli Berwald. That was a great book.  I also watched lectures posted online—one through the New England Aquarium that was a bioengineer talking about her study of jellyfish swimming mechanics and the potential to bioengineer products that are based on that type of propulsion mechanics. There is an engineer [in The Jellyfish Problem] who I kind of modeled off of that research. And there were podcasts. There were articles. There were op-eds. There were headlines about jellyfish because jellyfish are kind of a problem right now. There's some evidence that they're growing in numbers. So it was a type of research where I was just casting a wide net, seeing what I could find, but then filtering it through what I think is interesting and entertaining or contradictory or weird.

Maddie: The book’s protagonist is this sort of loner, outcast scientist who's fascinated by jellyfish. Through her, we get a sense of how these creatures are so much more than we think. Were you trying to make jellyfish more relatable, or make people think about them in different ways? 

Tessa: Not initially, but I arrived at that pretty quickly once I realized that I was going to be writing about jellyfish. I mentioned the inspiration for this book originally was Jaws. And my quibble with Jaws—which I think is a perfect movie and also a really good book—is it completely demonizes this shark and has perpetuated a lot of misunderstandings about those animals. So I knew from the very beginning that whatever my monster was going to be, the main character was going to have to be motivated by something other than this desire to destroy it. And so instead of the desire to destroy, Jo has this desire to understand that's born of this expertise, this fascination, this kind of academic love for those animals. 

Maddie: Jo’s also grieving the loss of her friend and scientific partner Aldo. How is that backstory important for understanding this story?

Tessa: People respond to grief in unique ways. Jo's coping mechanism is to self-isolate and to bury herself in her work. But what happens when she gets to Shattering Point, again trying to escape, is that the work of trying to figure out Clementine [the giant jellyfish] actually drives her closer to a reckoning with this grief. So suddenly her coping mechanism isn't working anymore. And it actually is tearing open this wound that she was working very hard to cover up. 

Maddie: We learn in the book that Aldo died in a cave diving accident. That was bone chilling to read about because I am mildly claustrophobic, but also fascinated by caves.

Tessa: I like you, have a fear and fascination, but it's really with deep water.

Maddie: There's a specific name for that fear. Thalassophobia. It involves persistent — this is Google — ‘persistent and intense dread of deep bodies of water like oceans, seas or large lakes.’

Tessa: Yeah, even lakes. I've spent very little time in or on the water in my life. And Jo loves the water, but because of this trauma she's experienced, she develops this phobia of being in and near water, which was actually very easy for me to write. It was harder for me to write the scenes where it's like, ‘this is what she loved about the ocean and scuba diving.’ Needless to say, I've never gone scuba diving, so another form of research I had to do was into scuba-diving. But cave diving is in my imagination the most extreme form of scuba diving. It's this combination of two very scary things. I think it just captures my fear and my imagination as something that's really extreme and frightening. And seems relatively dangerous.

Maddie: What made you decide to set the novel on a remote Maine island?

Tessa: Prior to drafting this book, I had never been to Maine, but I kind of always wanted to go. Again, the inspiration being Jaws, I wanted to keep that New England climate of the colder, choppier waters. But I didn't want to set it on or near Martha's Vineyard, which is the Jaws setting. I think I pulled up a map and was like, ‘hmm, where can I set the story?’ There's a lot of coastline in Maine, and there's over 4,000 islands. I think it wasn't initially even an island, but as I zeroed in on one of the themes of the book, which is isolation, it evolved naturally for the environment to itself be very isolated, very small, very removed. The island got smaller and smaller in subsequent drafts, more claustrophobic. And had less and less infrastructure. So there was more of the sense that these are people who have to figure out how to survive on their own without a lot of the infrastructure or support systems that most of us are used to. 

After I decided it was going to be set there, I went to Maine and did a lot of walking around and cataloging different sensory observations. I carried around this little notebook and I just wrote all kinds of things, absurd things, small things, not all of which ended up in the book, but a lot did.

Maddie: I've spoken to a lot of marine biologists over the years who don't like Jaws because it created so much fear about sharks. Having written a very different type of monster story, I'm curious how you think we can tell monster stories that are both thrilling but don't create unnecessary fear about nature or animals?

Tessa: I think point of view is the way out of that conundrum. If Jo wasn't in that book, if there was a different protagonist, it would be Jaws again. And no spoilers, but there are characters in The Jellyfish Problem who are definitely driven by the impulse to destroy a scary thing that's hurting them or that they don't understand. This is a drive that I think a lot of us can recognize: ‘I'm being threatened by this thing so what should I do? I should destroy it.’ And we see that everywhere in big ways and small ways in how we are currently interacting with our environment and with other species.

So absent Jo as the point-of-view character it is Jaws with a giant jellyfish, and it would be people taking turns trying to figure out how to hunt and blow up this giant scary animal. But it's not their story, it's Jo's. That's what drives it and allows it to feel different. I guess if you want to write a somewhat ecologically responsible sea monster story, you’ve  got to think about who's telling this story and what motivates them.

Maddie: Something I've always found interesting about jellyfish as a science writer is how they're survivors. As you mention in the book, they’ve lived through mass extinctions. They're also considered these canaries in the coal mine for environmental degradation. I've read articles about how, as the oceans continue to get warmer and more acidic, scientists expect to see more and more of these massive blooms of jellyfish. I'm curious whether that's part of what drew you to them?

Tessa: Not initially. Initially, my imagination was captivated by this video that I saw, and I wanted to learn a lot about them. But quickly, I ran into exactly the phenomenon you're describing, that there is some evidence— that's disputed by other people in the research community— that their numbers are growing as a direct result of human-induced climate change, because jellyfish are, somewhat surprisingly, really resilient to the kinds of like environmental degradation that are destroying other marine animals. So yeah, canary in the coal mine. But I think that was something that I leaned into more as I was writing and revising the book. Because we have a jellyfish here that is invented. Clementine's not a real jellyfish. But she's behaving in an unusual way, right? And later in the book, Jo says, when animals behave in ways they have not behaved before, you have to look at their environment and you have to say, ‘What are the triggers? What's driving this?’ Jo thinks about warming seas. What can that do to the kinds of pathogens that are in the ocean? What can that do to natural habitats and the food sources of these different animals? And the book doesn't necessarily single out one of those things because I think Clementine is still mysterious. Even at the book's end, there are some unanswered questions, which I think is true to the way that science works. You answer some questions, but you also develop new ones. But those are all things that she thinks about and you have to think about if you're trying to understand why an animal is behaving the way that it is, especially in the 21st century. 

Maddie: What do you hope readers take away from the book about the ocean, or our relationship to the environment?  

Tessa: I think a healthy respect for the unknown, because there's so much that is unknown for Jo, both about herself in the emotional sense of it, but also in terms of what she encounters scientifically through her adventure on Shattering Point. I think that respect for the unknown is a good way to circumvent that fear response of 'I don't know what this is, so it's bad and I have to destroy it.' That's definitely a type of response that The Jellyfish Problem is pulling away from. I would also like readers to take away a sense of expanded possibility, which goes along with our respect for the unknown, because Jo, as much as she's a scientist, she's little bit too constricted in what she thinks is possible. That's something that we could all probably stand to work on.

Maddie: Any really cool jellyfish facts you learned along the way? 

Tessa: A fact that did not make it into the book is that jellyfish have been to outer space. They have a structure called rhopalia that helps them know which way they're facing in the water, so if you flip a jellyfish upside down, it knows it's upside down and it can right itself. And it is supposedly similar to how our inner ears work. So some scientists in the nineties decided to breed jellyfish in outer space to try and study what would happen if humans had children in outer space and how that inner ear structure would be impacted. So they raised jellyfish in orbit, brought them back to Earth, and the jellyfish were basically dizzy for the rest of their lives. They never adjusted. So I don't know where that experiment went from there, but I suppose the conclusion was, yeah, let's not have babies in outer space. 

I also learned, this is something that's in the book, that jellyfish have delightful names. You've got the purple people eater, and the sea walnut, and the sea tomato. They're these whimsical entertaining names, and I love that little dose of personality from whatever researcher got to discover and name these animals. 

Maddie: Have you gotten any feedback on the book from any jellyfish experts? 

Tessa: I've had a few different readers reach out who have a background in marine biology or are just really into the ocean. No jellyfish experts as of yet. So I don't know if that means they didn't like it or they're not reading it or that they still need to reach out to me. I used to joke that I wanted to put a sticker on the cover of this book that said, 'Don't read this if you have a marine biology degree', because I was really insecure about writing a silly monster book that was going to depart in big ways from scientific fact. But now that the book is out, I'm kind of curious.  I would love for somebody who has that background to read this book and see what they think.