The Leviathan

The Leviathan's body was made from the life threads of a whale, but a hundred other species were tangled into its design, countless creatures fitting together like the gears of a stopwatch. Flocks of fabricated birds swarmed around it - scouts, fighters, and predators to gather food. Deryn saw message lizards and other beasties scampering across its skin.According to her aerology manual, the big hydrogen breathers were modeled on the tiny South American islands where Darwin had made his famous discoveries. The Leviathan wasn't one beastie, but a vast web of life in ever shifting balance.The motivator engines changed pitch, nudging the creature's nose up. The airbeast obeyed, cilia along its flanks undulating like a sea of grass in the wind - a host of tiny oars rowing backward, slowing the Leviathan almost to a halt.The huge shape drifted slowly overhead, blotting out the sky. Its belly was all mottled grays, camouflage for night raids.In the sudden coolness of the huge shadow, Deryn stared up, spellbound. This vast, fantastic creature had actually come to rescue her (Westerfield, 71).

At this section of the plot, Deryn, the female heroine, is drifting as the wind and her Huxley, a creature made unnaturally and is designed for single person flights, take her literally half-way across England. However, the Leviathan appears and rescues Deryn from her long flight, and takes her in. The Leviathan is also a creature made unnaturally, but it is more of an ecosystem; it is designed with hundreds of species present both inside and outside its body working collaboratively to keep the Leviathan afloat. Both the Huxley and the Leviathan are both used as military transportations and even as weapons.

I’m not really too sure as to how I would feel towards using biological creatures for warfare purposes, but I think it probably would not go too well with the public today. To be honest, there would probably need to be some sort of boot camp for actually being able to handle these creatures, and also being able to have the courage to be in contact with them. The creatures themselves are all hybrids, created by merging different species together to obtain favorable traits. Using creatures like these would probably drive off all the soldiers who are afraid of insects, beasts, or just animals in general. Also, environmentalists and religious authorities would be indignant over these developments, most likely saying that it’s unnatural and goes against God’s natural order. However, I think the idea of having biological creatures working together with technology is a possibility, though it’s not an idea that would develop any time soon. I believe it does have the potential to change society for the better, however.

The passage seems to show the possibility of using nature and technology in a way that both parties benefit from one another and to work together for one common purpose. Westerfield describes the Leviathan both in terms of its biology and its mechanics. For example, the Leviathan is described as a conglomeration of “countless creatures fitting together like the gears of a stopwatch”, using a simile to compare the way the species work together in terms of a machine. Even though it is technically one single biological creature, we, as the readers, get the sense that there is some sort of synergy between the nature and the technology used here from the imagery of the beast and its connection to that of technology and machines. It does make us think about a future where we could have this balance between technology and nature, instead of say, technology completely dominating over nature.

This type of future seems to indicate an ideal reality where we can make machines and creatures work together, despite their different functions, body structures, and behaviors. The emphasis in this passage, however, is on creatures of nature. It does seem to suggest that in the present day, we mostly focus on the latest technology, like iPhones, and we don’t particularly care too much about nature. But, there does exist some way in that both technology and nature in present day can work together to achieve a possible common goal, just like how the Leviathan functions. Hopefully, technology won’t completely take over the world in the future and that nature is still alive.