In September 1962, Jacques-Yves Cousteau's Conshelf I (Continental Shelf Station I) was deployed off the coast of Marseille, France, at a depth of 10 meters. This underwater habitat, a small steel cylinder, housed two 'oceanauts' for a week, demonstrating that humans could live and work on the seafloor for extended periods, paving the way for saturation diving.

Conshelf I, a vision of an underwater future, captured the utopian and dystopian imaginations of the 1960s. This underwater home, and the subsequent Conshelf experiments, inspired a wave of speculative fiction and poetry that explored the possibilities and perils of living beneath the sea, from the works of Jacques Cousteau himself to the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and the ecopoetry of the counterculture.