Prompts for Your Next Story

Got some story ideas for you!

As you know, I’m co-editing an upcoming anthology called 20,000 Leagues Remembered, a collection intended to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the publication of Jules Verne’s classic submarine novel. My co-editor, Kelly A. Harmon, and I are are still accepting submissions. Click here for details. This image is what we intend to use for the cover.

We’ve received a good number of submissions, and have accepted several. There’s still room for more, though. I’ll be providing a list of prompts that might help you write a story for this anthology. Feel free to use one, or your own variation of it.

Before I do that, I’ll state the rules for the anthology. Your story:

  • must pay tribute in some way to Jules Verne’s novel;
  • may be set in any time or place;
  • may use characters from Verne’s novel or you can make up your own;
  • need not be written in Verne’s style;
  • need not be ‘dark’ (as stories in other Pole to Pole Publishing anthologies have been);
  • must capture, in your own way, the sense of wonder and adventure for which Jules Verne is famous;
  • demonstrate a significant and obvious connection with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; and
  • must not disparage either the novel or its author.

Some of the prompts below may describe stories we’ve already accepted. That’s okay; write your story your way. Here are those promised prompts:

  • What if Captain Nemo had a time machine?
  • What was Captain Nemo’s (Prince Dakkar’s) origin story?
  • What adventures did Nemo have aboard the Nautilus before the events of Verne’s novel?
  • Did the Nautilus survive the volcanic eruption on Lincoln Island? What if it were salvaged today?
  • Did any of the Nautilus crewmen have an unusual talent, or a story worth telling?
  • What if a Nemo-like character were captain of an airship, a spaceship, a mole-machine?
  • What if a theme park (not starting with ‘D’) featured Twenty Thousand Leagues-inspired tour submarines, but one of the subs broke free of the designated ride?
  • What if Jules Verne rode a submarine before writing the novel?
  • What if a high-tech submarine manned by mysterious pirates began endangering sea travel today, how would the world’s navies react?
  • What’s the story of Captain Nemo’s wife? His children?
  • What if, in reaction to Nemo’s attacks, one or more of the world’s navies built a squadron of submarines designed to hunt down and destroy the Nautilus?
  • Did Captain Nemo have a pet? Tell its story.

Admit it. Some of those did get your creative fluids pumping around, didn’t they? Now all you have to do is write your story and submit it here. The hard part’s already been done for you by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 2, 2020Permalink

The Life-Cycle of Technology

On occasion, I blog about the ways society reacts to new technology. Today I’ll consider the life-cycle of a technology.

Graphing a technology’s life-cycle isn’t new. You can see this graph on Wikipedia. It’s the standard view of the profitability of a new technology over its life, including the four phases: Research and Development, Ascent, Maturity, and Decline.

I’ve built on the standard technology life-cycle curve by adding several points of interest to it. These don’t occur with every technology, and don’t always appear in the same order. But they are common enough that I’ve seen them frequently. These points of interest fascinate me, and I explore them in my fiction.

C1A. Clumsy First Attempts. Often the first prototypes of a technology are crude, fragile, ugly things that only a laboratory scientist could love. In no way do they resemble a marketable product. On occasion, these breadboard prototypes do not work at all.

IH&O. Initial Hype and Overpromise. When dreamy-eyed advocates of the new technology get hold of a gullible press, news articles will appear about the technology, touting the marvelous future that awaits us all when the technology revolutionizes our lives. Sure.

CEU. Careful Early Use. Particularly when a new technology involves some danger or personal risk, the researchers proceed in a deliberate, methodical manner in testing it. They take safety precautions. They go step-by-step, fully aware of the hazards. This is good, but it contrasts with the CU point occurring later.

GA. Gaining Adherents. Some technologists call these people ‘early adopters.’ They can hardly wait for the technology to hit the market. They’ll stand in line to be the first to buy.

RbT. Reaction by Traditionalists. People accustomed to older technology will be quick to point out any defects in the new one, even if there are far more advantages than disadvantages. They are resistant to change, but won’t admit it. Instead, they will seek out the slightest reason to criticize as a way of rationalizing their resistance. They start with “It’ll never work,” then after it does, they’ll say, “It’ll never catch on.”

PD. Path Dependence. I’ve blogged about this phenomenon before. Developers of new technology will imitate the appearance and terminology of existing technologies. This tendency will be abandoned later at the DfC point, but it often characterizes and constrains new technology, while at the same time making it easier to relate to.

CU. Complacent Use. After a long period of successful testing, researchers will reach a comfort level with the new technology. They will abandon the care and precautions they employed at the earlier CEU point. This complacence can result in a bad outcome, a failure. If this occurs, they will refine the technology to correct flaws before marketing it to users, who will also grow complacent and not treat risky technology with respect.

DfC. Departure from Constraints. At some point, developers and imitators free themselves from the Path Dependence tendency. They start to explore the realm of possibilities of the new technology, no longer bound by past precedent.

NPT. Nostalgia for Previous Technology. This is similar to RbT, but slightly different. We expect traditionalists to object to new technology, but at this point, even some regular users—advocates of the new tech—begin to pine for the previous technology. They miss it, recalling its advantages and forgetting its quirks.

Q?$?. Quality Up, Price Down. At this point, the technology comes into its own. Original developers, as well as imitators/competitors, improve the technology and the means of producing it. Price drops and product quality improves. It’s a period of rapid growth and acceptance, a boom time.

NPL. Nearing Physical Limit. Late in the Ascent phase, producers or users begin to sense that things can’t go on. The technology is bumping up against some limitation, or has begun to cause an unanticipated problem, or is fast consuming some scarce resource. Producers try some tweaks to counter the problem, to hone the technology so as to mitigate the impending limit.

RPL. Reached Physical Limit. At the peak of the Maturity phase, when the technology is providing the most profit to producers, it can go no further. It cannot be improved sufficiently to overcome whatever limitation constrains it.

NR. Negative Reaction. Users start rejecting the technology, blaming it for the problems it caused. Engineers and researchers cast around for possible replacement technologies. Market demand and profits both plummet.

CNT. Competition with New Technology. In this period of chaos, the technology struggles against an emerging rival. The technology is fated to either die entirely or steady out at some low level, continuing to be used by die-hards who prefer it to its replacement.

There you have it, your newly-labeled technology life-cycle curve, provided by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 1, 2020Permalink

Jules Verne’s Impact on Undersea Fiction

The publication of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea led to a boom in books about undersea adventures. But the boom didn’t occur immediately and Verne wasn’t the sole cause.

Before explaining all that, I’ll mention an upcoming anthology of short stories titled 20,000 Leagues Remembered, scheduled for release on the 150th anniversary of Verne’s submarine novel. Until April 30, fellow editor Kelly A. Harmon and I are accepting short stories inspired by that novel. For more details and to submit your story, click here or on the cover image.

Verne wasn’t the first to venture into undersea fiction, though the predecessor works are fantasy, not science fiction. The list is brief. If I stretch the definition of undersea fiction, it includes the Biblical story of Jonah, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1831 poem “The City in the Sea,” and Theophile Gautier’s 1848 novel Les Deux Etoiles (The Two Stars). At least the latter included a submarine.

As shown by the graph, many books involving submarines appeared in the years following Verne’s undersea novel. The vast majority of these were intended for what we now call the Young Adult market, and included works by Harry Collingwood, Roy Rockwood, Luis Senarens, Victor G. Durham, Stanley R. Matthews, and Victor Appleton.

In a similar manner, Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) preceded an explosion of novels with subterranean settings. To a lesser extent, these also included many YA works.

But notice a curious thing about the two curves. The rise in subterranean fiction occurs earlier and starts its upward trend earlier than does the curve for undersea fiction.

I have three theories to explain this.

  1. The most obvious reason is that Journey to the Center was published six years before Twenty Thousand Leagues. That six-year gap doesn’t explain it all, however.
  2. I believe other authors, after reading Twenty Thousand Leagues, were daunted by the prospect of imitating that novel. To write credibly about submarines required knowledge most writers lacked. However, subterranean fiction required no geological expertise and no vehicle. Moreover, the writer’s underground setting could include any fantasy elements imaginable.
  3. I think the later peak in submarine novels had less to do with Verne than it did with the introduction of real submarines into the world’s navies. With actual submarines becoming familiar to readers, authors could pattern their fictional vehicles after real ones.

Neither of these mountain-shaped curves is due solely to Verne’s works. They both coincide with a boom in publishing adventure fiction of all kinds, not just undersea and subterranean. A drop in publishing costs, a rise in disposable income, a recognition that young people craved to read—all these factors attracted writers and publishers to new opportunities.

Still, I don’t want to understate Verne’s impact on undersea fiction either. Prior to Twenty Thousand Leagues, such works were fantasies. Afterward, they were either science fiction or real-life adventure stories.

After the publication of Twenty Thousand Leagues, it became the standard to which later submarine novels got compared. Even today, 150 years later, if you ask people to name a submarine novel, most likely they will either answer with The Hunt for Red October, or Verne’s book.

I just can’t help this fascination with stories of the sea. After all, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 23, 2020Permalink

3 States of Writing Flow

Fellow author Andrew Gudgel wrote a great blogpost on December 19, 2019 regarding writing, and I’d like to expand on it.

His post is titled “Water, Molasses, Glass” and you may have to scroll down to get to it. He compares writing to the densities of three substances—water, molasses, and glass.

Sometimes writing comes easily and flows like water. Other times it’s more difficult and flows like thick molasses. What about glass? Well, that’s probably a bad example, since it’s a solid and doesn’t flow at all. The common belief that it’s a slow-moving liquid is false.

Water, Molasses, and Tar

A better third substance would be tar, or pitch. That is a slow-flowing (highly viscous) liquid. Very patient researchers at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia) have been watching pitch pour from a funnel since 1930. In those ninety years, nine drops have fallen. Nine drops. Rather a slow way to resurface your driveway.

Let’s get back to the writing comparison.

Water. When writing flows like water, life is good. You know what’s coming next, and nothing’s slowing you down. Without effort, you’re churning out words in a steady stream. People have studied this state of mind and call it ‘Flow.’ I blogged about this phenomenon here. It’s great while it lasts, but it always ends at some point. While you’re in that zone, just go for it.

Molasses. Here’s where writing is harder. You’ve got to force the words out. There are long stretches where you’re just thinking and not producing prose at all. You consider doing something more fun, like, say, cleaning the garage. When in this mental state, I suggest a few strategies:

  1. First, try to recall why you started this writing project in the first place. Something made you want to write this story, and you were enthused about it then. Try to recapture that passion.
  2. Second, write an outline, or revisit the one you previously wrote. Jot down where you think the story is going. Or, since you’re stuck for words, create a mind-map of all the possible alternatives for the part you’re stuck on. It could be different plot paths, different scene descriptions, possible character types, or whatever.
  3. Third, consider writing something else for a while. Trust that your subconscious, your muse, will work on the original problem and come up with a solution.

Tar. At a drop each decade, this is truly writer’s block. I’ve written about writer’s block before, both the diagnosis and the cures. There are several things that might be causing your writer’s block, and you have to pick the right cure for your particular cause.

May your words always flow like water and your rejections and negative reviews flow like tar. That’s the writing wish for you from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 16, 2020Permalink

Jules Verne Found Alive!

French author Jules Gabriel Verne, born on this date in 1828, has been found alive at the age of 192. Reports of his death at age 77 in 1905, and accounts of his subsequent burial, apparently were in error.

Remarkable though it may seem, there is simply no other way to explain the large number of people, still today, who’ve undergone life-changing experiences after contact with Verne. This list includes people who became:

  • Astronauts or astronomers after reading From the Earth to the Moon;
  • Submariners, undersea explorers, or naval architects after reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea;
  • Geologists, spelunkers, or cavers after reading Journey to the Center of the Earth;
  • World travelers or circumnavigators after reading Around the World in Eighty Days; and
  • Engineers, scientists, or fiction writers after reading any of Verne’s works.
Monument to Verne at the Jardin des Plantes in Nantes

I can see you’re not buying it. Okay, Skeptic, there’s an entire Wikipedia page devoted to the Cultural Influence of Jules Verne. It lists the following people who claim to have been inspired to pursue their profession by Verne: astronaut William Anders, undersea explorer Robert Ballard, undersea explorer William Beebe, astronaut Frank Borman, polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, speleologist Norbert Casteret, undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, rocketry innovator Robert Goddard, cosmonaut Georgi Grechko, roboticist David Hanson, astronomer Edwin Hubble, submarine designer Simon Lake, astronaut Jim Lovell, French General Hubert Lyautey, inventor Guglielmo Marconi, speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel, explorer Fridtjof Nansen, rocketry innovator Hermann Oberth, aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky, rocketry innovator Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and rocketry innovator Wernher von Braun.

There’s a similarly long list of authors who drew inspiration from Verne. Ray Bradbury said, “We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.”

There exists a group known as the North American Jules Verne Society. Seriously, are you likely to have an active fan club on a different continent 192 years after your birth?

Yes, Verne is still alive, if not in body, at least in spirit. Very much in spirit.

Cover image for 20,000 Leagues Remembered

You, too, can join the list of those who’ve been influenced by Verne. You can write a short story and submit it for inclusion in the upcoming anthology 20,000 Leagues Remembered. I’m co-editing it, along with Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing. It’s scheduled to be published on the 150th anniversary of the publication of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea this coming June. Here you can see the cover image we’ve selected. For more information, and to submit your story, click here.

Happy 192nd Birthday, Jules, wherever you are. Today, in raising a toast to you with a glass of French wine, countless Verne fans around the world will be joining—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 8, 2020Permalink

Cover Image Revealed

My co-editor, Kelly A. Harmon, and I have chosen the cover image for our upcoming anthology, 20,000 Leagues Remembered. The book will pay tribute to Jules Verne’s classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on the June 2020 sesquicentennial of its publication.

Here is that image, with the Nautilus being menaced by a tentacled monster.

Cover image for 20,000 Leagues Remembered

Pole to Pole Publishing is still open for short story submissions to the anthology. Click here for details, and to submit your best work. Although the closing date is April 30, please note we are accepting stories as we go, so the anthology may well fill up before that date. Submit early!

We’ve received some wonderful stories so far. Still, there’s no one more anxious to read your story than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 3, 2020Permalink

Telling Readers All About You

How much should your readers know about you? In this age of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, when everything private is public, is it necessary to reveal every detail?

Before social media and even before the internet, authors were mysterious. Each one seemed like a magical wizard living in some unknown and hidden cave. A publisher would release a book, but readers wouldn’t know anything about the wizard, and publishers wouldn’t tell what they knew.

In those days, you could read the ‘About the Author’ section on the book jacket or an occasional magazine interview, but that was all you knew. The wizards stayed in their caves, typing away.

Times have changed. If you like a particular author, you can find out home town, number of cats owned, shoe size, political leanings, and a description of that writer’s most recent meal. No more wizards; no more mysteries; it turns out authors are just everyday people with an odd tendency to sling words around.

As a writer, you may still choose to remain a digital hermit, invisible to Facebook, a wizard in your cave. But you’d be going against the trend, and against the current guidance.

The web is filled with advice blogs for new authors. You must have a social media presence. Your readers are curious about you, so you must connect with them. Be authentic; show your audience you’re a real person. A few hours spent on social media will help grow your book sales.

Not all authors follow this advice. One of them, Tom Corson-Knowles, recommends writers shun social media entirely. He argues you’ll achieve better sales by writing better books; staying off Twitter will give you more free time to write; and social media is cramping your creativity.  

Each writer must take the path that seems right, and be willing to change if that’s not working. As for me, I write these weekly blogposts, post on Twitter and Facebook once a week or so, and sometimes post book reviews on Goodreads. I rarely talk about personal stuff on those platforms.  

Although I’d be more comfortable as a mysterious, cave-dwelling wizard, I’m willing to admit things are changing. Almost everyone shares personal details these days, and if I knew I could increase sales by posting a few things, I’d do it.

For now, I’ll reveal one spicy secret. Though I like dogs and (sometimes) cats, there are currently no pets in the home of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 2, 2020Permalink

Character Analysis — Captain Nemo

Now we’ve come to the last major character in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Let’s study Captain Nemo.

Before we do, I’ll remind you to submit a short story to 20,000 Leagues Remembered, a tribute anthology scheduled for publication on the 150th anniversary of Verne’s marvelous novel. Along with unparalleled word-master, Kelly A. Harmon, I’m co-editing this anthology for Pole to Pole Publishing. The official closing date is April 30, but you should submit early. We’re accepting stories as we go, and this publisher has filled each of its anthologies before the closing date. For more details, and to submit your story, click here.

Regarding Captain Nemo, I’ll restrict this analysis to what we know from the 20,000 Leagues novel and disregard information provided later in The Mysterious Island as well as later adaptations.

When readers first encounter Nemo, they learn he appears self-confident, energetic, and courageous. He is tall, of indeterminate age, and has wide-set eyes. He says, “To you, I’m simply Captain Nemo,” adding a rank to the name “no one” by which Odysseus (another sea captain) fooled the Cyclops.

In subsequent chapters, Pierre Aronnax learns Nemo is a highly intelligent scientist and engineer, has divorced entirely from the land and all nations, and is immensely wealthy. Later, Aronnax discovers Nemo cares deeply for a dying crewman and buries him on the seafloor. He assists a stricken pearl diver off the coast of India, saying he “lives in the land of the oppressed, and I am to this day, and will be until my last breath, a native of that same land!”

Nemo provides a huge sum of gold to a Grecian diver, apparently to aid in the uprising of Crete against Ottoman rule. Aronnax sees a set of paintings in Nemo’s cabin, all portraits of historical revolutionaries. Using the Nautilus’ ram, Nemo slaughters a pod of sperm whales to save some baleen whales. He then attacks and sinks a ship whose nationality is unknown to Aronnax. Following this act of destruction, Aronnax spies Nemo kneeling and weeping before a portrait of a woman and two children.

The Captain combines several opposing characteristics and sentiments:

  • He claims to support the downtrodden, yet he designed the Nautilus with a distinct two-class system, and treats Aronnax as an upper-class gentleman, in contrast to the way he treats Conseil, Land, and his own crew.
  • He financially supports freedom-seeking revolutionaries, and his Mobilis in Mobili motto implies a love of freedom, yet all who enter his Nautilus are confined aboard forever.
  • At the outset, Nemo declares, “I’m not what you term a civilized man! I’ve severed all ties with society, for reasons that I alone have the right to appreciate. Therefore I obey none of its regulations…” yet he plants a flag at the South Pole just as any imperialistic conqueror from a land nation might.

It’s well-known that Verne initially gave Nemo a detailed back-story with a former nationality and a traumatic past to explain his motivations, but his publisher urged him to delete all that. We’re left with an unexplained mystery, a Byronic Leonardo da Vinci, a marauding scientist, a sea hermit, a gentleman savage.

Like Captain Ahab, Nemo suffers from a troubled past that leads him on an obsessive oceanic quest, resulting in madness. Unlike Ahab, the cause is not as evident as a bitten-off leg, but resides only in his mind. His motives remain as invisibly submerged as his submarine.  

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these recent blogposts about the four main figures in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This one completes the quartet of character analyses by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 26, 2020Permalink

Character Analysis — Pierre Aronnax

Having analyzed Conseil and Ned Land in recent blogposts, I’ll turn my attention today to the narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Pierre Aronnax.

First, don’t forget to submit your best short story to the upcoming anthology 20,000 Leagues Remembered, my tribute to Verne’s undersea masterpiece on its sesquicentennial. I’m co-editing this book, along with editor and award-winning author Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing. We’ll officially close for submissions on April 30, but I encourage you to submit well before then. We accept stories as we go, and every previous anthology from this publisher has filled up before its closing date. See this site for guidelines and to submit your story.

Pierre Aronnax, forty years of age, was an Assistant Professor at the Paris Museum of Natural History. He’d written a definitive book on sea creatures, titled The Mysteries of the Great Ocean Depths. Aronnax had been visiting the Nebraska Badlands and was in New York when he received an invitation to join the crew of the frigate USS Abraham Lincoln on its mission to hunt down the reported ‘sea monster.’

Of the three men taken aboard the Nautilus, only Aronnax is given a tour and introduced to most of the wonders aboard. Captain Nemo treats him as an approximate equal, a gentleman, while he treats the rest of his crew, and both Conseil and Ned Land, as lower-class commoners. To our modern sensibilities, this sounds absurd, but to Verne’s class-conscious readers it must have seemed understandable, even natural.

Some have theorized Verne was playing with the word ‘arrogant’ in giving the Professor his surname, but I disagree. I don’t believe Verne thought of Aronnax as arrogant or intended him to appear that way to readers. The Professor was a Nineteenth Century gentleman-scholar and behaved that way. Though he may seem arrogant to us, it is unlikely Verne would have foreseen our modern sensibilities and named his character accordingly.

I’ve mentioned before that Conseil served as the imaginative voice of Verne. I think Aronnax and Nemo together represent what Verne aspired to be. Verne would have loved to be a scientific scholar like Aronnax and an engineer like Nemo.

That said, Aronnax is a disappointing character. He enjoys being free to examine undersea life from within a submarine, while ignoring that he’s trapped aboard. He admires the scientific and engineering genius of Nemo while choosing to ignore warning signs of the Captain’s insanity. Aronnax knows he must someday try to leave the submarine, but would prefer that date be well in the future. In short, he’s there to observe and to marvel for us, not to act in any daring way.

Modern writers can understand Verne’s dilemma. To pull off his undersea novel with all its various travels and adventures, Verne needed at least one character who was content to remain in an iron prison for the duration. Aronnax is that character, but he comes off as too trusting and too slow to act. He is carried along by events rather than causing things to happen. These aren’t traits we like to see in a main character.

In a way, we can think of Verne’s Aronnax as an unreliable narrator. The Professor gives us accurate information on the Nautilus, Nemo’s scientific and engineering prowess, and the many fish they see and places they visit. But he ignores and then rejects Ned Land’s opinion about Nemo and the Canadian’s plans for escape. Only in the end do we (and Aronnax) see that Ned was right all along.

I suppose you can guess the next 20,000 Leagues character to be analyzed by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 19, 2020Permalink

Character Analysis — Ned Land

Today we’ll consider the character Ned Land in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Before doing so, I’d like to remind you to submit a short story to Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered, an anthology I’m co-editing along with the creative and capable Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing. We’re open for submissions and accepting stories as we go, and this publisher’s previous anthologies have all filled up before their closing dates. Therefore, don’t wait until the official closing date of April 30. Submit your story here.

Turning now to Ned Land, Verne introduces him as a Canadian harpooner from Quebec assigned to the frigate USS Abraham Lincoln to assist the crew in hunting a menacing sea creature.

Verne has fun with this character’s name. In French editions, it is rendered as “Land,” the same as in English translations, not the French word for land, “terre.” Verne’s audience would have had to know the English word to get his pun. Ned is a man of the sea named for the land, who craves to escape from under the sea and eat food of the land.

Between Professor Aronnax and Ned Land, readers come to understand two opposing ways of dealing with their imprisonment aboard the Nautilus. The pair are opposites, with Aronnax’s servant Conseil serving as the median. On several spectra, the two men occupy extreme ends.

Ned Land is the ‘physical’ to Aronnax’s ‘intellectual.’ Land is often depicted as taking action, while Aronnax observes and deliberates. It is Ned who throws the harpoon, who assaults a steward, who goes ashore and shoots birds and kangaroos, who grabs the electrified railing, who kills a shark, who harpoons a dugong, and who joins in the attack on the giant squid, who tries to signal a nearby ship, and who arranges their escape from the Nautilus.

Further, Ned Land acts without thinking, while Aronnax thinks without acting. Often, Ned acts impulsively, sometimes with a bad result but sometimes heroically. Aronnax suffers from ‘paralysis by analysis,’ knowing what he should do, but not doing anything about it.

Land represents the common man in contrast to Aronnax, the upper-class gentleman. Aronnax eats with Nemo and bunks in a room next to the Captain’s. Ned bunks and eats with Conseil in the midships area reserved for the crew. Ned speaks plainly, occasionally joking, while Aronnax speaks like a professor throughout.

The last facet of their contrast is what I’d term the ‘man of nature’ vs. the civilized man. Ned’s comfort zone is the out-of-doors, in the wild, killing and preparing his own dinner. For his part, Aronnax would be lost without his servant and is more at home in drawing rooms and eating gourmet food. Here, most of Verne’s audience would identify closer with the professor, but nonetheless be fascinated by the harpooner.

Given their differing viewpoints, it’s no wonder Aronnax sees the Nautilus as a vessel of underwater exploration, while Land sees only a prison. Aronnax sees Captain Nemo as a rational engineer and scientist, while Land sees him as an insane pirate and jailer.

Although the two share the same goal, leaving the Nautilus, they differ on timeframe and method. Aronnax would like to leave someday, after persuading a captain he sees as reasonable. Land wants to get off the submarine immediately, by force if necessary.

Verne resolves this conflict in a draw. The trio departs the Nautilus far later than Ned would have liked, after spending seven months aboard. However, they must sneak off the ship without the Captain’s permission, during an emergency, and with Ned guiding.

Ned Land, then, is the perfect ‘friendly opposition’ to Pierre Aronnax, giving the novel dramatic tension throughout. Have you ever known someone like Ned Land (except for his harpooner occupation, of course)? A few like him have been known to—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 12, 2020Permalink