20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
By Jules Verne
In 1866, ships of various nationalities sighted a mysterious sea monster, which, later suggested, might be a gigantic narwhal. The U.S. government assembles an expedition in New York City to find and destroy the beast. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist and the story’s narrator, is in town at the time and receives a last-minute invitation to join the expedition; he accepts.
Canadian whaler and master harpooner Ned Land and Aronnax’s faithful manservant Conseil are also participants. The expedition leaves Brooklyn aboard the United States Navy frigate Abraham Lincoln, then travels south around Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean. After a five-month search ending off Japan, the frigate locates and attacks the monster, which damages the ship’s rudder. Aronnax and Land are hurled into the sea, and Conseil jumps into the water after them. They survive by climbing onto the “monster”, which, they are startled to find, is a futuristic submarine.
They wait on the vessel’s deck until morning, when they are captured, hauled inside, and introduced to the submarine’s mysterious constructor and commander, Captain Nemo.
Genre: Science Fiction | Nautical
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Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne, 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905, was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.
Biography
His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, considering the technological advances of the time. In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies.
His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema and for comic books, theatre, opera, music, and video games. Verne is considered an essential author in France and most of Europe, where he has greatly influenced the literary avant-garde and surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere, where he had often been labelled a writer of genre fiction or children’s books, mainly because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels usually were printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.
Jules Verne
