Vingt mille lieues sous les mers Reading Order

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870) by Jules Verne is the most enduring of his Voyages extraordinaires and the novel that created the modern submarine as an imaginative space. Captain Nemo — whose name means 'no one' — captains the Nautilus, an electrically powered submarine he has built himself, and is the most complex of Verne's protagonist-antagonists: a man who has renounced terrestrial civilization entirely, who sustains himself from the sea alone, who shows the French naturalist Professor Aronnax the wonders of the ocean floor, and who destroys warships with the same Nautilus he uses to show Aronnax the beauty of the deep. The novel is simultaneously a natural history of the ocean (Verne had read everything available on marine biology and oceanography), an adventure story of mounting claustrophobia, and a philosophical novel about civilization and its rejection: Nemo is a Romantic rebel of a new kind, who has found in the deep sea a freedom from all human systems that the land cannot offer. The sequel, L'Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island, 1874), partially reveals Nemo's backstory. The novel was immediately successful and was translated everywhere; it created the template for every submarine story and every underwater narrative that followed.