Frank Reade Jr.’s Submarine Boat

Frank Reade Jr.’s Submarine Boat is one of Luis Senarens’s many Frank Reade Library dime novels, working in the proto science fiction adventure mode that made him one of the most influential American genre writers of his era. The submarine boat as a Frank Reade invention recurred across multiple stories in the series, with the various improved submarine vessels that Frank Reade Jr. built giving Senarens room to deliver underwater adventures, encounters with strange marine creatures, and the kind of nautical engineering speculation that the wider Frank Reade tradition was built around.

The submarine concept in late nineteenth century dime novels was particularly interesting because the actual technology of submarine vessels was just beginning to develop in the period when Senarens was writing. The various early submarine experiments of the late nineteenth century, including the John P. Holland designs that would eventually result in the United States Navy’s first commissioned submarine in 1900, gave the period an active engineering background that Senarens’s fiction could draw on while extending the speculation in directions that real engineering had not yet reached. The Frank Reade submarine boats are typically larger, more capable, and more comfortably appointed than any actual submarine of the period, with the dime novel imagination running ahead of the actual engineering possibilities in ways that the wider science fiction tradition would later develop further.

The Frank Reade stories typically follow a young American inventor and his crew of friends and engineers as they build a remarkable new machine 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. Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea had established the submarine adventure as a major science fiction subgenre in 1870, and Senarens’s various Frank Reade submarine stories drew on the Verne template while developing their own particular American flavor.

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. 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.