{"product_id":"2940012560391","title":"Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea","description":"Classic sea stories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us,\"\u003cbr\u003eadmits Professor Aronnax early in this novel.  \"What goes on in\u003cbr\u003ethose distant depths?  What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit,\u003cbr\u003ethose regions twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water?\u003cbr\u003eIt's almost beyond conjecture.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJules Verne (1828-1905) published the French equivalents of these words\u003cbr\u003ein 1869, and little has changed since.  126 years later, a Time\u003cbr\u003ecover story on deep-sea exploration made much the same admission:\u003cbr\u003e\"We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans.\"\u003cbr\u003eThis reality begins to explain the dark power and otherworldly\u003cbr\u003efascination of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBorn in the French river town of Nantes, Verne had a lifelong\u003cbr\u003epassion for the sea.  First as a Paris stockbroker, later as a\u003cbr\u003ecelebrated author and yachtsman, he went on frequent voyages--\u003cbr\u003eto Britain, America, the Mediterranean.  But the specific stimulus\u003cbr\u003efor this novel was an 1865 fan letter from a fellow writer,\u003cbr\u003eMadame George Sand.  She praised Verne's two early novels Five Weeks\u003cbr\u003ein a Balloon (1863) and Journey to the Center of the Earth\u003cbr\u003e(1864), then added:  \"Soon I hope you'll take us into the ocean depths,\u003cbr\u003eyour characters traveling in diving equipment perfected by your\u003cbr\u003escience and your imagination.\"  Thus inspired, Verne created one\u003cbr\u003eof literature's great rebels, a freedom fighter who plunged beneath\u003cbr\u003ethe waves to wage a unique form of guerilla warfare.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInitially, Verne's narrative was influenced by the 1863 uprising of\u003cbr\u003ePoland against Tsarist Russia.  The Poles were quashed with a violence\u003cbr\u003ethat appalled not only Verne but all Europe.  As originally conceived,\u003cbr\u003eVerne's Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose entire family\u003cbr\u003ehad been slaughtered by Russian troops.  Nemo builds a fabulous\u003cbr\u003efuturistic submarine, the Nautilus, then conducts an underwater\u003cbr\u003ecampaign of vengeance against his imperialist oppressor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut in the 1860s France had to treat the Tsar as an ally,\u003cbr\u003eand Verne's publisher Pierre Hetzel pronounced the book unprintable.\u003cbr\u003eVerne reworked its political content, devising new nationalities for\u003cbr\u003eNemo and his great enemy--information revealed only in a later novel,\u003cbr\u003eThe Mysterious Island (1875); in the present work Nemo's background\u003cbr\u003eremains a dark secret.  In all, the novel had a difficult gestation.\u003cbr\u003eVerne and Hetzel were in constant conflict and the book went\u003cbr\u003ethrough multiple drafts, struggles reflected in its several\u003cbr\u003eworking titles over the period 1865-69: early on, it was variously\u003cbr\u003ecalled Voyage Under the Waters, Twenty-five Thousand Leagues Under\u003cbr\u003ethe Waters, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Waters,\u003cbr\u003eand A Thousand Leagues Under the Oceans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVerne is often dubbed, in Isaac Asimov's phrase, \"the world's\u003cbr\u003efirst science-fiction writer.\"  And it's true, many of his\u003cbr\u003esixty-odd books do anticipate future events and technologies:\u003cbr\u003eFrom the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Hector Servadac (1877) deal\u003cbr\u003ein space travel, while Journey to the Center\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eof the Earth features travel to the earth's core.  But with Verne\u003cbr\u003ethe operative word is \"travel,\" and some of his best-known titles\u003cbr\u003edon't really qualify as sci-fi: Around the World in Eighty Days\u003cbr\u003e(1872) and Michael Strogoff (1876) are closer to \"travelogs\"--\u003cbr\u003eadventure yarns in far-away places.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese observations partly apply here.  The subtitle of the present\u003cbr\u003ebook is An Underwater Tour of the World, so in good travelog style,\u003cbr\u003ethe Nautilus's exploits supply an episodic story line.\u003cbr\u003eShark attacks, giant squid, cannibals, hurricanes, whale hunts,\u003cbr\u003eand other rip-roaring adventures erupt almost at random.  Yet this loose\u003cbr\u003estructure gives the novel an air of documentary realism.  What's more,\u003cbr\u003eVerne adds backbone to the action by developing three recurring motifs:\u003cbr\u003ethe deepening mystery of Nemo's past life and future intentions,\u003cbr\u003ethe mounting tension between Nemo and hot-tempered harpooner Ned Land,\u003cbr\u003eand Ned's ongoing schemes to escape from the Nautilus.  These unifying\u003cbr\u003ethreads tighten the narrative and accelerate its momentum.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOther subtleties occur inside each episode, the textures sparkling\u003cbr\u003ewith wit, information, and insight.  Verne regards the sea from\u003cbr\u003emany angles:  in the domain of marine biology, he gives us thumbnail\u003cbr\u003esketches of fish, seashells, coral, sometimes in great catalogs\u003cbr\u003ethat swirl past like musical cascades; in the realm of geology,\u003cbr\u003ehe studies volcanoes literally inside and out; in the world of commerce,\u003cbr\u003ehe celebrates the high-energy entrepreneurs who lay the Atlantic Cable\u003cbr\u003eor dig the Suez Canal.  And Verne's marine engineering proves\u003cbr\u003eespecially authoritative.  His specifications for an open-sea submarine\u003cbr\u003eand a self-contained diving suit","brand":"SAP","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47081522856176,"sku":"2940012560391","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940012560391_p0.jpg?v=1763570051","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940012560391","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}