Twenty thousand leagues under the sea

I had read this as a child, but evidently didn't remember much of it. I picked it up to re-read because while planning a visit to Snæfellsjökull I read that the place has significance in this story. I'm very glad I did, and that I did so while in Iceland, though there are some of the typical regrettable portions (ugh "Race Science" makes an appearance, though mercifully only for a few pages), and towards the end it jumps the shark a bit.

I think there's basically two things that make Verne still worth reading, when I mostly avoid white mens' SFF from before this century, never mind before the 20th:

One is that he was a very good observer of the things in his stories that were drawn from reality. I can't tell if he actually went to Iceland himself, but if not then he had good notes from someone who did. His rendering of Reykjavík fits with what I've read in museums in that city, and the descriptions of the landscape work very well, when it's one that would be pretty hard for someone who'd never left mainland Europe to imagine. There was a detail of the Icelanders' clothing that seemed off and stereotyped to me, until we happened to go to a museum with a reenactor who was clearly wearing what I'd misunderstood the description of a few days earlier.

The other is that he was an avid follower of the big scientific debates of the time. The central conceit of Journey is that the mad geologist is trying to prove a theory that sounds absolutely bonkers in hindsight. But it sent me down a wikihole, from which I learned that it was very much a live controversy in the mid-19th Century. Verne picked what ended up being the losing side of the argument, because it's the one that gave him a story to write, but somehow that feels much more credible knowing that he didn't make it up.

I was somewhat disappointed in 20,000 leagues. It was much more hard science fiction and not so much action adventure. Nothing particularly against hard sci-fi its just not so much my preference. I'm also disappointed not in Verne by any means, but in the public libraries that keep putting these very much adult oriented books in the children's section because they are "classics" which I guess is their way of saying kids should read the classics.

This might be two classic audiobooks in a row that I think the movie was better. Like Black Beauty, the Disney version of 20,0000 Leagues was a childhood favorite of mine. Though I've probably only seen this one a dozen times. In the film it always felt like a surprise around every corner, while in the book it was a scientific discovery. While that's certainly a kind of surprise, it's not giant monster attack.

I am sure at its time it was a amazing, but in the 21st century nothing to write home about.

...even though marine science and geology have passed it by.

Captain Nemo is compelling and mysterious as ever, if the passengers are rather broadly drawn (at least all three of them are distinct) and the crew is more or less faceless. (Aside from Nemo, the crew doesn’t speak to the passengers, so they’re never able to pick up the Nautilus’ private language.)

And Verne has really thought things through. Like, how did Nemo get something of this scale built without someone noticing? He farmed out different parts and systems to different factories scattered across the world. Ocean-based textiles, undersea mines, an isolated source of fuel that no surface-based ship will find.

Even the parts where he made up oceanography out of whole cloth, like the deeper outflow throgh Gibraltar (which as it turns out does exist, but not for the reasons Nemo suggests, which have since been found to be incorrect) or the open sea at the south pole (which doesn’t) – or Atlantis, for that matter, with the Canaries as the remnants of the sunken peaks – have at least some logic beyond the rule of cool.

I read an abridged version years ago, when I was in my early teens, and I’ve been meaning to read the whole thing ever since. I’m glad I finally got around to it! Though I suspect a lot of the abridgment had to do with the frequent (and lengthy) lists of fish.

Now I need to finally read The Mysterious Island…

Cross-posted from my website.