TIL Jules Verne penned a sequel to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" called "The Mysterious Island" that told Captain Nemos back story.
By annotationcrescent
When I was 13, I really liked it.
Reader discussion: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
Public reader discussion about Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea in the WeRead Catalog by Jules Verne.
Tell me about Jules Verne
By small_dragon_hill18
I just finished Journey To The Center Of The Earth and I can’t stop thinking about it since. Do his other books have the same kind of depth, or are they mostly just fun because they’re easier to get through and the writing’s good? I’d love to hear what you think—also what’s your favorite book of his? Thanks!
Which book edition has the original wording of the French version of Jules Vernes' 20000 leagues under the sea?
By dustysail29028
I’ve got a copy of *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* and the French version feels really “modern” to me. I know the 1850s isn’t that long ago, but when I read English books from around that time they still feel kind of far away. With this French one, though, I honestly don’t feel much difference. Not sure if it’s just because I’m not a native French speaker, so maybe I’m not picking up on things as much?
What is the best English translation of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?"
By hiddenDeer60
There are just way too many different versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and I have no idea which one is actually the best. I grabbed the F. P. Walter translation from Amazon, but then I noticed it’s the same one that’s already free on Gutenberg.org. Do you think I should just stick with it, or is there another translation you’d recommend instead?
Seven Novels by Jules Verne
By YellowCat
Not totally sure what I’m expecting here, but I like the vibe of those older adventure titles. They all sound kind of wild and fun—air balloon, moon trip, weird undersea stuff, going around the world, and then that mystery island. I’m guessing it’s going to be an imaginative ride more than anything.
What's the best version of 20, 000 Leagues under the Sea?
By simple-market5111
Trying to find the best unabridged version—should I go with Audible Plus or Scribd?
Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf both had uninterrupted streaks of at least 4 all-time bangers in a row. Are there any authors with more?
By AcarusBrisk
Twain had that streak of four big ones in a row: - Tom Sawyer (1876) - Prince and the Pauper (1881) - Huckleberry Finn (1884) - A Connecticut Yankee… (1889) Woolf too: - Mrs Dalloway (1925) - To the Lighthouse (1927) - Orlando (1928) - The Waves (1931) Austen definitely had a great run, but Mansfield Park is kind of stuck right in the middle of it, and that one doesn’t usually get treated like a top-tier all-time classic. Hemingway’s run is good too, but it gets broken up by *To Have and Have Not*, which doesn’t usually get ranked as a classic either. Same vibe with Steinbeck—his big stuff gets interrupted by smaller releases. So I’m wondering… are there other authors who had 5+ “all-time classic” novels back-to-back? Like, sustained uninterrupted greatness—consecutive home runs kind of energy. And I know Shakespeare had a bunch in a row, but since he’s mostly plays, I’m not sure that should count. Also, I removed the Shakespeare part anyway because the dates of when some of the plays were written are disputed, so it’s hard to know how many “hits” really line up.
I couldn't finish Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
By wilddog1979
Both my mom and my husband read this when they were kids and they both really loved it. We still had a copy in our bookshelf (in Dutch), so I figured, why not give it another go. I did enjoy the way it kicks off—the whole mysterious “sea monster” vibe, the hunt, and then all the cool stuff about the Nautilus. But after that, I started to drag a bit. It turns into a ton of descriptions of marine life, and I get why that would feel amazing if you’ve never heard of any of it. As an adult, though, I’ve come across these things so many times that it got kind of boring for me. And the science felt off sometimes too, sometimes pretty noticeably. I know it’s from around 1870, so I’m not shocked, but it definitely pulls me out of the story. I also wasn’t a big fan of the way it keeps mentioning God made all the creatures—that part doesn’t really fit with me. Has anyone read it recently? Do you think I’m quitting too soon? (I just finished their hunting trip in the “Forest of Crespo”.)
I just finished Jules Verne's Mysterious Island
By hawkWandering8606
So I just finished *Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas* about a month ago and I honestly loved it. I really got attached to the characters, but Captain Nemo was my favorite. The only thing was, I felt like I never really knew much about him—like there wasn’t much backstory at all. So I looked around online and found out there’s a sequel called *The Mysterious Island*, and I ordered it and waited about a week for it to show up. And I loved that one too. The story had me hooked, the characters were fun, and it all just flowed really well. Yesterday I finally made it to the last chapters and I was like, okay, I’m ready for whatever comes next. Then Captain Nemo shows up, and he basically tells his whole life story… and then he dies. Like, right there. He’s just gone. I kept rereading parts because I couldn’t believe it, but nope—he really dies. I was completely heartbroken. I finished the rest of the book with my eyes all watery and then I just sat there after closing it, totally wrecked. It’s wild because I finally found a character I actually felt something for, and then they end up gone. Does anyone have advice for how to cope with that? Or how to move on?
Books similar to The Odyssey and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
By chillyhawk2001
I’m working on one of those big epic voyage stories with a ship as the main setting, and I’m trying to find more books/other media that could help me. I’m starting with stuff like the Odyssey and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but I want to branch out and really build up my reading list for what I’m writing. Edit: wow, this got a lot of attention way faster than I expected—thanks everyone. Also my book is probably going to be pretty pun-tastic.
Is 20,000 Leagues under the Sea technically Hard Sci-fi?
By EnvelopeRapid
It’s been ages since I read this, but isn’t *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* basically one of the earliest “hard sci-fi” books? A lot of what he came up with still feels like it could’ve been possible with the scientific knowledge people had back then—maybe even the giant squid stuff. That made me wonder something though: when we call something hard sci-fi, are we judging it by what the author knew at the time, or by what we (and other readers) know now? I think I know where I land, but I’m curious what other people think.
What are the biggest classics in American literature?
By page-bright2002
I’m studying literature, but I’m mostly used to British stuff. I really want to get into the big American classics next. What are the books that basically every American has read at some point? So far I’ve got Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from what I’ve seen online. What else should I add? Edit: Wow, thanks so much everyone! I guess I’m going to be busy reading for a long time with the list y’all gave me :)
Keep coming back to Jules Verne
By pineChapter
Last year I decided to spend more time with “classics” so I could finally get through some of the big ones people always bring up. I’ve listened to stuff like Dracula, The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, Treasure Island, From the Bell Tolls, and then a few that don’t seem to get as much attention like King Solomon’s Mines, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Phantom of the Opera. But I keep ending up back with Jules Verne. I started with Journey to the Center of the Earth, then did 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, and I just finished Around the World in 80 Days. I don’t know what it is, but his style always has me hooked. He makes these worlds and characters that I genuinely want to keep going back to. I don’t really have a question so much as just saying I really like his books. If you want a good adventure one to listen to, I’d definitely recommend grabbing one. So far my favorite has been The Mysterious Island, and I listened to it with David McCallion—yeah it’s a long listen, but it’s totally worth it. What’s everyone else think about Jules Verne? And if you have any suggestions for what to try next (I mainly do audiobooks on Audible), I’m all ears.
JULES VERNE AI - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
By midnightDune
Thanks for sending this in! If you want to post your full command, could you reply with your job ids?
Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea by Adam Roberts
By Starlight_Mist
Hey y’all, my favorite corner of the internet—got a rec. In *Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea* by Adam Roberts, they build and staff a version of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus with sailors and scientists, and they’re aiming for the Continental Shelf and maybe further. But right when they get past that point, everything goes off the rails. They lose control and the sub just keeps sinking nonstop. Instead of ending with everyone getting crushed by pressure, some really strange stuff starts happening—like the pressure somehow evens out—so they go even deeper than you’d think is even possible. I swear this book doesn’t slow down. Every chapter feels like it cranks up the tension, and it’s packed with claustrophobic mystery, creepy weirdness, some characters you’re ready to grab by the collar, and other characters you’re totally rooting for. And the weird stuff just keeps getting weirder. Also, the illustrations by Mahendra Singh at the end of each chapter are awesome. They don’t spoil anything big, but they definitely make you want to keep reading because they get more and more intriguing. Last thing: you don’t need to have read *Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea* first. There are a few nods, but a quick summary of the Jules Verne book is probably enough. And you don’t even have to like the original—I personally hated it, and I still loved this one. 5/5, would absolutely recommend.
They Are In a Submarine: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
By Jar
Reading the newest chapter (1126), I suddenly thought the “Man Marked by Flame” might be taken pretty directly from Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, like the whole ocean-depths thing. Oda’s already pulled from real people and fiction before, like Blackbeard and Don Quixote, so it wouldn’t be that weird if he based someone on a character from one of the biggest sci-fi books ever. Captain Nemo is from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. That book is all about exploration, freedom, and the effects of tech getting ahead of people, which honestly lines up with a lot of One Piece right now. Mostly though, it’s an adventure story about going into the unknown. With the Nautilus, you get all these strange deep-sea places, underwater forests, wrecks, sea life, all that. Oda also isn’t new to using old literature for arc ideas. Impel Down is a good example, with Luffy going down into the prison like a kind of Hell, which connects pretty clearly to Dante’s Inferno and Dante’s descent. And since we recently got that reveal about the One Piece world being mostly underwater, plus the focus on people trying to explore what’s down there, it feels kind of right for Oda to lean hard into Verne next. What makes me think this is the stuff around the recent chapters and the Man Marked by Flame himself. We’re told he can make whirlpools that drag down ships coming near him, which is a lot like Nemo sinking ships with the submarine. Then in the latest chapter, the Thousand Sunny just vanishes. It kind of feels like it got pulled into a whirlpool, and maybe the Straw Hats are on the “Nautilus” now. Whether that thing is a ship, a submarine, or both doesn’t really matter, and yeah, the title is a little click-baity. What matters is that in Verne’s book, the main characters eventually get out after the submarine runs into a whirlpool, and they make it back to the surface. Nami being dressed like a Giant of Elbaf inside what looks like a Lego dollhouse could also fit with Captain Nemo’s character. Nemo basically lives shut away from the world, alone in the sea in his submarine. But that isolation has a cost, since he becomes kind of cut off from humanity. I think the Man Marked by Flame might have taken the Straw Hats and dressed them up as “Vikings” because he’s basically roleplaying them as Giants. He saw a ship from Elbaf and took the Sunny as a way to experience the outside world. It’s also possible the Man isn’t even a man, but a Giant playing with them like toys, which would explain the Lego/toy house idea. I’ve seen a few people say it could be Prince Loki, but I’m not really sold on the prince of Elbaf being out at sea like that, though I guess that could be explained pretty easily. That isolation could also be why we’re only hearing about the Man Marked by Flame now. He’s this mysterious new person hardly anyone knows about, but he somehow knows about the Road Poneglyphs. If he’s so important to finding the One Piece, why is he only being brought up now? A life like that could explain it. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea isn’t the only Jules Verne book that feels familiar either. He wrote a bunch of adventure stories, and some of them basically sound like One Piece stuff: - Around the World in Eighty Days (1872): Phileas Fogg tries to go around the globe in 80 days. That’s basically One Piece’s setup, with Luffy trying to circle the world through the Grand Line. Loguetown = the town of the beginning and the end. - The Mysterious Island (1874): Castaways end up on a strange island and later meet Captain Nemo, which links it back to the earlier book. One Piece has a lot of mysterious islands, but Laugh Tale feels like the biggest fit for that title. - Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864): Explorers go down into the Earth and run into weird creatures and places. The Straw Hats haven’t done that yet, but the theme works for basically every arc. It’s kind of the core One Piece vibe whenever a new arc starts. And maybe they’ll go to the center of the Earth someday. - From the Earth to the Moon (1865): It’s about space travel, with a giant cannon sending people to the moon. That’s basically Skypiea. The Straw Hats get to a sky island through the Knock-Up Stream, and then Enel later ends up on the Moon. I don’t know if Oda has ever straight-up said Jules Verne was an inspiration for One Piece, but the similarities are kind of hard to ignore. So yeah, I’ve always thought the Man Marked by Flame was going to be a totally new character, but I never really knew what his place in the story would be. With how often Oda pulls from classic books, especially lately, it seems pretty possible that he’s got Captain Nemo in mind here. The isolation, the exploration, the deep-sea mystery stuff in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea fits really well with what’s going on in One Piece now. Even if he isn’t directly based on Nemo, or maybe only shares some of those themes, the whole Road Poneglyph thing and his disappearance seem like they point to a much bigger role in the search for the One Piece.
Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Sea: Ned Land and Other Thoughts
By Sonnet_Hardcover77
Hey everyone—just wrapped up Twenty Thousand Leagues, and I know I’m jumping the gun, but I might already be calling it my new all-time favorite. Something I noticed near the end: I keep wondering if Ned Land’s name is kind of a pun about how miserable he is on the Nautilus. Like “I NED / need” land… not sure if that was intentional, though. Also, I actually didn’t pick the book out of nowhere. I got inspired by this awesome single-player board game where you play as Captain Nemo, go after treasure, sink enemy ships, and stir up revolution against imperial governments. The character is so interesting, and it also made me think of Bruce Wayne. I’m a big comic person (Batman especially), so I could totally see Nemo as an early version of that kind of vibe. Curious what you all think—any adaptations you really enjoyed?
Podcast Review: “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (book/movie) Jules Verne - Richard Fleischer (Kirk Douglas) - Rod Hardy (Michael Caine)
By envelope_tide
Captain Nemo’s whole slow climb up to the surface (so to speak) makes the story feel like it has some real pull. It’s got that Victorian travel-book vibe, but in a very early sci-fi kind of way. I know a lot of people get annoyed by the lists. And yeah… the nonstop listing of sea plants and sea creatures, with classifications and all the commas, can be a lot. Verne does throw in some genuinely cool descriptions sometimes, but sometimes it’s more like “we saw this, then this, then this,” and then moving right along. I’ll admit I definitely zoned out over them at times. Still, I caught myself looking up a bunch of the weird stuff online, and then of course falling into endless video rabbit holes just to see what they’re actually like. I’m pretty sure Verne would’ve loved that effect—because even when some descriptions weren’t quite right (assuming he was working with what people knew back then), it still made me want to learn. It felt like he opened up the sea for me, and I could actually go verify things instead of it just being a made-up world. The characters were another thing I liked. Aronnax can seem “flat” to the casual reader, but he’s basically a real professor type—he gets dragged into the science adventure and can’t help himself. Then you’ve got the Canadian harpooner as the action/common-sense foil, and Conceil floating in between as the agreeable sidekick. They kind of match their roles, but you can still feel them changing slowly. And Land? His grumpy attitude totally fits, and it’s almost like when everything goes wrong, his bitterness and gut instincts are the thing Aronnax has to hold onto. Even Conceil seems to shift a bit, especially with the whole bond/awkward dynamic with Land, like he thinks the professor is going to drift off too far. And Captain Nemo—he’s the most interesting, not really flat at all. At first he’s this unstoppable force with principles, even though he’s kind of kept in the background for a good chunk of the book. When he does show up, it’s usually with a lot of swagger, and he doesn’t really mess up. But the moments where Verne lets you peek into Nemo’s head are kind of unsettling in a good way. Those little “nuggets” make him feel darker than he lets on. The Nemo side of the story itself also works really well. I also can’t not mention how far ahead of his time Verne was—submarines, tasers, and those breathing ideas that weren’t a thing yet. That’s the good “great science fiction” stuff, where you can tell the imagination is pushing past what was possible back then. The adventure is solid too. It’s not just “cool science,” there’s actual tension: sometimes it’s man vs beast, sometimes it’s man vs nature, and sometimes it’s that slow man vs man conflict between Nemo and his unwelcome guests. Some of those moments get pretty intense, and they keep building as the story goes. There’s also a bit of a progressive angle in how characters talk about things like over-fishing. Of course, this is a story about seamen, so the fishing still happens a lot—which makes it feel a little conflicting, but also kind of realistic? Like it’s not totally black-and-white. The oceans themselves basically feel alive. The descriptions of flora and fauna are great, and stuff like the Gulf Stream helps you understand how the ecosystems fit together, which is genuinely awesome. It’s like Verne makes the sea both alien and familiar at the same time. My only real hang-up: this is a translation, and it sounds like some English versions cut out big chunks of the original. That makes me wonder what I’m missing. Even with that, I still enjoyed it a lot—not only as a product of its time, but because the undersea adventure genuinely made me want to learn more about the oceans. Podcast plug: If you like my reviews, this book (and the movie) came up in a discussion on my podcast “No Deodorant In Outer Space” — available on iTunes or here: https://nodeodorantinouterspace.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/review-twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea-bookmovie-jules-verne-richard-fleischer-kirk-douglas-rod-hardy-michael-caine/