The Great Sea Serpent portrays the laying of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable--a technological feat that revolutionized communications and ushered in global capitalism--and links it with a tale by Hans Christian Andersen that tells of the cable's arrival from the perspective of sea creatures. This great "serpent" is a marvel to humans, who see it as the birth of the Information age, and a threat to sea life, for whom it portends the arrival of more and more man-made industrial detritus in the sea.