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In preparation for the advent of Whale Weekly, the Whale Weekly Discord server decided to do a speedrun of Jules Verne’s submarine classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Over the course of about six weeks, we read one chapter a day–the book is not very long but the chapters are many and short, so it was usually only about two pages of reading a day for forty-odd days.
This book truly features all the highlights of nineteenth-century writing. Long, flowery sentences full of exclamation points and now-obscure references. Extremely dated science, featuring a helping of outright pseudoscience like physiognomy. Male friendships that now read as not-particularly-subtle homoeroticism. A class-blindness so ingrained that the narrator regularly forgets that like 90% of his cast constitutes people, including his supposedly dearest friends. Casual racism of the most unquestioningly essentialist kind. It is, to put it delicately, quite a time capsule of a book.
Our narrator, Monsieur Pierre Aronnax, is a French marine biologist, who, accompanied by his servant Conseil (French for “advice”), joins a U.S. Navy crew chasing after a mysterious thing-in-the-sea that has caused numerous accidents around the world. M. Arronax is invited on this mission after educatedly weighing in on the controversy on the side of the mysterious threat being some type of giant narwhal, as it is impossible for it to be a submarine–someone would have known about it being built.
Aronnax, Conseil, and a Canadian harpooner named Ned Land all wind up, through a series of shenanigans, stranded on top of the mystery object itself, and are adopted-slash-imprisoned by the mysterious Captain Nemo, who it turns out has actually managed to build an enormous, electrified submarine (with a big narwhal-esque horn on the front) without anybody hearing about it, having filled Arronax’ plot hole with the simplest of spackles: money. Captain Nemo is inexplicably filthy rich, and as a result of unspecified grievances against the world, has gone seasteading in his custom-built horned submarine so that he can WITHDRAW FROM SOCIETY and be ALL BY HIMSELF except of course for his crew of nameless companions who do all the work and aren’t allowed to speak any normal modern languages to Pierre and company, even though it is revealed that at least one of them actually does speak French. I admit that it has been a little hard to buy totally into the Rich Inventor Genius and his Magnificent Electrified Vehicle schtick reading this book specifically in the time window of November and December 2022, for current events reasons that Jules Verne could not have foreseen in 1870, and as such I simply cannot write this review without saying something mean-spirited about Captain Nemo, no matter how much an easily beguiled nerd-boy like Aronnax likes him. To Aronnax’ credit he does eventually realize that some probably very important information about what the hell Captain Nemo is doing under the sea is being withheld from him, although admittedly, to Captain Nemo’s credit a major part of what he’s doing under the sea seems to be harassing the British Empire, which apartheid emerald boy would never be cool enough to do.
I between joining the inhabitants of the Nautilus and making a daring escape in [redacted], Aronnax and his new mysterious broody rich boyfriend go on many fun underwater dates, like going hunting and visiting Atlantis (in this book Atlantis is real). They also battle some large octopuses, go coal mining (???) and pearl diving, visit Captain Nemo’s secret underwater graveyard, observe many shipwrecks of varying ages, and get stuck in an iceberg at the South Pole. These episodic adventures are liberally seasoned with lists of the names of all the various marine flora and fauna that Aronnax (a marine biologist) sees. A throughline of non-episodic tension is kept up from Ned Land, who dislikes being imprisoned in a submarine by a rich eccentric, and provides a foil to Aronnax’s fanboying about the amount of marine biology he gets to observe. Ned Land is very obsessed with escaping, a feat that Captain Nemo ensures is next to impossible, right up until he fucks up and it isn’t.
One small note in this book that tickled me is that it is presented as cool and futuristic, but only near-futuristic, that the Nautilus is a fully electrified vehicle. From the point of view of sitting here 150 years later, having a decent chunk of my day job taken up with stuff about shifting the transportation market from fossil fuel based vehicles to fully electrified ones, that part feels a lot more current than it ought to.
Anyway, this book was a ride! A long underwater ride full of fish, in fact. A Long Swim, if you will. I’ll stop now.
This book truly features all the highlights of nineteenth-century writing. Long, flowery sentences full of exclamation points and now-obscure references. Extremely dated science, featuring a helping of outright pseudoscience like physiognomy. Male friendships that now read as not-particularly-subtle homoeroticism. A class-blindness so ingrained that the narrator regularly forgets that like 90% of his cast constitutes people, including his supposedly dearest friends. Casual racism of the most unquestioningly essentialist kind. It is, to put it delicately, quite a time capsule of a book.
Our narrator, Monsieur Pierre Aronnax, is a French marine biologist, who, accompanied by his servant Conseil (French for “advice”), joins a U.S. Navy crew chasing after a mysterious thing-in-the-sea that has caused numerous accidents around the world. M. Arronax is invited on this mission after educatedly weighing in on the controversy on the side of the mysterious threat being some type of giant narwhal, as it is impossible for it to be a submarine–someone would have known about it being built.
Aronnax, Conseil, and a Canadian harpooner named Ned Land all wind up, through a series of shenanigans, stranded on top of the mystery object itself, and are adopted-slash-imprisoned by the mysterious Captain Nemo, who it turns out has actually managed to build an enormous, electrified submarine (with a big narwhal-esque horn on the front) without anybody hearing about it, having filled Arronax’ plot hole with the simplest of spackles: money. Captain Nemo is inexplicably filthy rich, and as a result of unspecified grievances against the world, has gone seasteading in his custom-built horned submarine so that he can WITHDRAW FROM SOCIETY and be ALL BY HIMSELF except of course for his crew of nameless companions who do all the work and aren’t allowed to speak any normal modern languages to Pierre and company, even though it is revealed that at least one of them actually does speak French. I admit that it has been a little hard to buy totally into the Rich Inventor Genius and his Magnificent Electrified Vehicle schtick reading this book specifically in the time window of November and December 2022, for current events reasons that Jules Verne could not have foreseen in 1870, and as such I simply cannot write this review without saying something mean-spirited about Captain Nemo, no matter how much an easily beguiled nerd-boy like Aronnax likes him. To Aronnax’ credit he does eventually realize that some probably very important information about what the hell Captain Nemo is doing under the sea is being withheld from him, although admittedly, to Captain Nemo’s credit a major part of what he’s doing under the sea seems to be harassing the British Empire, which apartheid emerald boy would never be cool enough to do.
I between joining the inhabitants of the Nautilus and making a daring escape in [redacted], Aronnax and his new mysterious broody rich boyfriend go on many fun underwater dates, like going hunting and visiting Atlantis (in this book Atlantis is real). They also battle some large octopuses, go coal mining (???) and pearl diving, visit Captain Nemo’s secret underwater graveyard, observe many shipwrecks of varying ages, and get stuck in an iceberg at the South Pole. These episodic adventures are liberally seasoned with lists of the names of all the various marine flora and fauna that Aronnax (a marine biologist) sees. A throughline of non-episodic tension is kept up from Ned Land, who dislikes being imprisoned in a submarine by a rich eccentric, and provides a foil to Aronnax’s fanboying about the amount of marine biology he gets to observe. Ned Land is very obsessed with escaping, a feat that Captain Nemo ensures is next to impossible, right up until he fucks up and it isn’t.
One small note in this book that tickled me is that it is presented as cool and futuristic, but only near-futuristic, that the Nautilus is a fully electrified vehicle. From the point of view of sitting here 150 years later, having a decent chunk of my day job taken up with stuff about shifting the transportation market from fossil fuel based vehicles to fully electrified ones, that part feels a lot more current than it ought to.
Anyway, this book was a ride! A long underwater ride full of fish, in fact. A Long Swim, if you will. I’ll stop now.
