Molluscs in culture Elder (1st century AD) in his "Natural History". The Gorgon of Greek mythology may have been inspired by the octopus or squid, the severed head of Medusa representing the animal, the beak as the protruding tongue and fangs, and its tentacles as the snakes. The six-headed sea monster of the "Odyssey", Scylla, may have had a similar origin. The Nordic legend of the kraken may also have derived from sightings of large cephalopods; the science fiction writer Jules Verne told a tale of a kraken-like monster in his 1870 novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Throughout the world, the
Science fiction accuracy, especially "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870) which predicted the modern nuclear submarine. In 1887 the novel "El anacronópete" by Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau introduced the first time machine. Many critics consider H. G. Wells one of science fiction's most important authors, or even "the Shakespeare of science fiction”. His most notable science fiction works include "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (1896), "The Invisible Man" (1897), and "The War of the Worlds" (1898). His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. In his non-fiction futurologist works he predicted