Frank Reade, Jr.’s Search for the Silver Whale

Frank Reade, Jr.’s Search for the Silver Whale is one of Luis Senarens’s many dime novels in the Frank Reade Library, the connected sequence of stories about young inventor Frank Reade Jr. and his various sons and assistants. Senarens wrote hundreds of stories about the Frank Reade family across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often under the pen name Noname, and the cumulative output established many of the conventions that would later define the science fiction genre proper.

The search for the silver whale premise hints at the kind of nautical exploration plot that the Frank Reade Library used in many of its entries. A legendary creature or natural phenomenon, the silver whale of the title, has been reported by various witnesses but never confirmed by serious investigators. Frank Reade Jr. builds an appropriate vessel, in this case probably one of his electric submarines or improved nautical machines, and sets out to find and document whatever is actually behind the legend. The search plot gives Senarens room to deliver the kind of underwater adventure, encounters with strange creatures, and engineering speculation that the Frank Reade audience loved.

The Frank Reade stories typically follow a young American inventor and his crew of friends and engineers as they build a remarkable new machine, an electric airship, a submarine, a steam powered land vehicle of some kind, and use it to explore some remote and dangerous corner of the world. The stories combined adventure plotting with an interest in plausible engineering speculation, which made them important precursors to the science fiction that would emerge as a distinct genre in the early twentieth century. Senarens corresponded for years with Jules Verne, who admired the American writer’s work, and the influence ran in both directions across the Atlantic.

The prose is brisk, the action moves, and the period assumptions about race, empire, and the American frontier are very much present in ways modern readers will need to navigate. The dime novel format imposed certain limits on character development and on prose polish, but within those limits Senarens was a craftsman who knew his audience and delivered what they came for.

For scholars of early American popular literature, of the prehistory of science fiction, or of the dime novel as a publishing phenomenon, Senarens’s work is essential. Many of his stories are now in the public domain.