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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is one of those classics that has so made its imprint upon SF and popular culture that one needn't have read the book to know its features: the dark genius, Captain Nemo; the futuristic Nautilus with its thousand strange inventions and capabilities; and gigantic octopi that can drag a ship down to the abyss. In fact, this book is so invested into modern culture that hardly anyone nowadays has read it, and it is a work that, even more than 120 years after its first publication, yet deserves examination.
Verne was a scientist. This isn't one of my favorites of verne's, but I still appreciate a wonderful scifi adventure. his books are always grounds to teach, to learn, and to speculate. Verne always wrote his novels with a tool that many novelists, especially scifi novelists, lack. That tool is knowledge. It's so facinating now, so many years in the future, to see how amazingly close to the truth Verne often was using the little information available to him and his great scientific mind. My hero.
A fancinating story for kids and all the ages. Should have a map and ocean fish handbook while reading it. The printing is little too small for kids.
I never received this item. The seller sent this item to my shipping address at my billing address. 2 different addresses as we do not receive mail at our house.
If you don't know the story, it's about a naturalist, Professor Arronax, and his assistant on a quest to find the giant sea creature that's been menacing the seas. I've never seen one, but I'm thinking of adding one to the Netflix queue. The enigmatic Captain Nemo is never fully explained, nor are the professor and his two companions.
Like when I tried re-reading Tolkein a couple of years ago, I found I lacked the patience to read through pages and pages of interminable description. The professor's unconcern about his imprisonment on the submarine is partially explained by his fascination with the undersea worlds he encounters; the complacence of his assistant and Ned Land are less understandable. But the sea creature turns out to be a submarine, the Nautilus, and they're joined by the harpooner Ned Land in being rescued/captured by its crew when their attack on it fails.I definitely encountered this book far too late to fully enjoy it.
It's left up to the reader to fill in the blanks. There were several times when I just couldn't stand it any longer and I'd put the book down and go do something else. Only sheer stubbornness made me finish it.The story itself was interesting, though the style of the times was a bit of an obstacle.
Ned Land does try to escape occasionally, but he's portrayed as narrow-mindedly violent because of that, which I found peculiar.I do see why films were made from this--condensing those descriptive passages into scenery would make the action and adventure parts of the story stand out more. Any suggestions of which version to try.In short, I'm giving this 4 stars for the story, but 2 stars for the pain of reading it.
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