Tag Archives: Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered

How Deep is a League?

We all know Professor Aronnax and his companions traveled 20,000 leagues under the sea in Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus. Just how deep is that? It turns out, that’s the wrong question.

Let’s set that aside a moment.

You can certainly sense the excitement building—on the web, in the bookstores, and in conversations with everyone you meet. Less than a week to go, now, until the launch of the new anthology 20,000 Leagues Remembered. On Saturday, June 20, you can celebrate the 150th anniversary of the marvelous Verne novel. Remembered is a brand-new collection of stories by modern authors, each tale inspired by Jules Verne’s masterpiece. Pre-order it here.

Back to our question. What, exactly, is a league? Like most obsolete units of measurement, there is no precise answer. It dates from ancient Rome, when the leuga meant about 7500 pedes (Roman feet), or about 1.4 of our statue miles.

According to Wikipedia, the league has taken on a wide variety of lengths over the millennia. It ranged from the Roman length of 1.4 miles all the way to the Norwegian league of 11.3 miles.

That doesn’t help us much. Maybe the better question is, what did Jules Verne think a league was? Even in his time, the unit was falling out of favor. It had taken on a vague, almost poetic meaning. At one syllable, it rolled off the tongue much easier than ‘kilometer’ did.

According to the annotated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, translated by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter, Verne used a league of 2.16 nautical miles, or 2.49 statute miles.  

So, 20,000 of Verne’s leagues would be nearly 50,000 miles. The deepest known spot in any ocean is Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, with a depth of 6.79 standard miles or 3.14 leagues.

Let’s say we stay in Verne’s fictional world. In the chapter titled “The Sargasso Sea,” the Nautilus reached a depth of 16,000 meters, which Verne translated as 4 vertical leagues.

Even if the ocean stretched all the way to Earth’s center, it could only be about 3,963 miles, or 1,592 leagues deep.

Clearly, Verne intended that the Nautilus travel 20,000 leagues horizontally in its path through the oceans. Verne later wrote a novel titled La Jangada – Huit Cents lieues sur l’Amazone, or Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon. Nobody would expect anyone to travel 800 leagues downward in a river.

For a humorous treatment of the question, we can turn to the TV show Saturday Night Live. They ran a skit, and I believe it was in Season 19, Episode 17, which originally aired on April 9, 1994. It satirized the 1954 Disney movie (then 4 decades old), and had Kelsey Grammer as Captain Nemo, Phil Harman as Ned Land, Mike Myers as Professor Aronnax, and Rob Schneider as Conseil. Here’s the transcript, and here’s a partial video clip.

The next time someone asks you how deep a league is, you have a good answer. Or, you can simply refer them to—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 14, 2020Permalink

Writing for Jules Verne

Here’s a thought experiment for you. It’s 1868, and your close friend, Jules Verne, is deathly ill. Since you’re an author too, he’s asked you to write a novel in his stead. All he’s got is a concept—a ship that travels underwater—and a title: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. You cannot refuse your friend. What will your novel be like?

Remember, nobody has ever written a novel involving a submarine. Yours will be the first. You jot down some plot ideas:

  • A single nation is the first to build and use a working military submarine. Perhaps it’s your beloved France; or the mighty seapower, Great Britain; or the science-loving and adventurous United States.
  • Some wealthy and inventive person builds a submarine and uses it purely for exploration and the advancement of Science.
  • A wealthy and evil man builds a submarine and uses it for vengeance against those who have wronged him.
  • A man is convinced Atlantis exists, and builds a submarine to search for it.
  • A sailor lost someone close (a brother?) to a specific and recognizable giant squid, and builds a submarine to pursue and destroy the creature. (If Melville’s Moby-Dick was successful, this could be too.)
  • Perhaps combine the scientist and the vengeance-obsessed pirate, and tell the story from his (or her?) point of view.
  • A sailor falls in love with a woman he believes is a mermaid, but she dives underwater. He builds a submarine and travels 20,000 leagues in search of her.
  • A treasure-hunter builds a submarine and recovers gold and other valuables from sunken ships.
  • A nation announces a huge prize for whichever privately-built submarine wins a 20,000-league race.
  • A clever criminal builds a submarine and robs banks along various coasts, escaping underwater. A detective hero must track him down.

After an hour, you’ve written down these ideas and another 20 more. Now you must select the best one. Will your eventual novel be as good as the one Jules would have written, had he not become ill?

We’ll never know, of course. It’s just a thought experiment. In real life, Verne wrote his marvelous novel himself, without your help. For its first publication, it was serialized in the Magasin d’éducation et de recreation, edited by Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The issue containing the final chapter came out on June 20, 1870.

That means June 20 of this year, just 13 days from now, is the 150th anniversary, the sesquicentennial, of that undersea classic. To commemorate this date, I’ve partnered with Kelly A. Harmon, Senior Editor at Pole to Pole Publishing, to edit an anthology of short stories inspired by Verne’s masterwork.

Titled 20,000 Leagues Remembered, it will launch on June 20. We’ve chosen 16 wonderful stories for the volume, each taking a different approach, but all born from a love of Jules Verne’s fantastic adventure novel. Each one captures some aspect of the adventure, the wonder, and the drama of Twenty Thousand Leagues.

Perhaps Verne’s book is no longer new to you, but these 16 stories will be. Beginning on June 20, you’ll be able to buy the ebook version of our anthology at Pole to Pole Publishing’s website or at other online booksellers. Pole to Pole will put out a paperback print version as soon as possible after that.

Back to that thought experiment. I’m sure you thought of some possible story ideas yourself, in addition to the ones I listed. Feel free to add a comment to this blogpost, sharing one or more of your ideas with—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 7, 2020Permalink

That Bookshelf Behind You

On TV these days, we’re seeing the insides of a lot of people’s homes. Particularly bookshelves. If you’re an expert being interviewed by the media, it’s important to have an impressive bookshelf as backdrop behind you.

Ah, but what is an ‘impressive’ bookshelf? Let’s explore that today, so you can prepare for your next Skype call from a TV network.  

A portion of Poseidon’s Scribe’s bookshelf

I’m not that impressed by bookshelves arranged for show. If it looks like the books sit there for years without being read, that indicates a shelf intended to dazzle others, not to serve the owner.

A useful home bookshelf should have a sense of chaos, of disorder, with some books leaning, and perhaps others left horizontal. That indicates a reverence for books as things to be read, not as props to be displayed.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne gives Captain Nemo a library aboard the Nautilus intended both to impress Professor Aronnax (and thus, the reader) and to convey a sense of frequent use by an eclectic mind.

Captain Nemo’s bookshelves

“Tall pieces of furniture, made of black rosewood inlaid with copper, contained in their deep shelves a vast number of books uniformly bound…works of science, ethics, literature, in many languages, were in abundance…And, strange to say, these books were not grouped according to the languages they were written in, and the resultant mixture suggested that the captain could read fluently whatever books came to hand, regardless of language.”

(Well, I do have one quibble, Captain Nemo. If the Nautilus takes an angle or encounters rough seas on the surface, most of your books will fall to the floor. Bookshelves aboard the submarines I’ve seen always include moveable restraining bars to keep books in place.)

Cover image for 20,000 Leagues Remembered

This seems a good moment to mention that both I and Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing are co-editing an upcoming anthology titled 20,000 Leagues Remembered, a collection of short stories intended as a sesquicentennial tribute to Jules Verne’s novel. Submit your own story here.

Returning to the topic of bookshelves, remember—they’re meant to be used, not just seen. If a TV network calls you for a video interview, you’d like to be known as a person who reads, not just owns, books.

If you work for a news station and want to interview an expert on the use of bookshelves as background, or just desire to interview an interesting author, call me and ask for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 19, 2020Permalink

It’s Not Too Late

You still have time to submit a short story to the upcoming anthology, 20,000 Leagues Remembered. This book will be a sesquicentennial tribute to Jules Verne’s novel.

Cover Image for 20,000 Leagues Remembered

I’m co-editing this anthology along with Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing. We’re received and accepted a number of fine stories already.

However, we still have room for two or three more. For us to accept your submission, 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.

Come on. You’re sitting at home anyway. You might as well type up a story and send it here.

Your story might well be the next one accepted by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 6, 2020Permalink

12 Cures for Stir-Craziness

Stay in your homes, the experts tell us. Keep away from others. Don’t gather in bars, restaurants, or theaters. There aren’t any sports. All your club meetings are cancelled. The boss called off that business trip and made you telework. You’re bored, being at home all the time. You’ve gone stir-crazy. What to do?

Here’s my answer—write something.

That’s right. Sit at your keyboard, or grab pen and paper, and write something.

“But,” you’re saying, “I’m not a writer!”

My answer—how do you know?

Here’s my list of stir-craziness cures, staring with the easiest ideas:

  1. Why not make a list of supplies you’re going to need soon? Wow! You’re writing!
  2. Remember that personal organizer book you bought back in 2015, and never used? Dig it out. You could come up with some life goals, and plans to achieve them. Maybe even a personal mission statement. Or a bucket list. You never found time for that before, but you’ve got time now.
  3. Start a journal (or diary, or logbook—call it what you want). Write down whatever occurs to you. Write about social distancing, and how much you hate it. Write about feeling like you’re under house arrest, the isolation and loneliness. Get the emotions out. Write as if nobody will ever read it.
  4. Write emails to relatives and friends you haven’t connected to in a while. Write tweets and Facebook posts. Write old-fashioned letters, on stationery; the Post Office still delivers.
  5. Write an article, essay, or vignette. The topic should be something you know about. At first, write as if you’re not going to send it anywhere. Later, as you look back over it and fix it up, it might not seem half bad. Perhaps it’s publishable.
  6. Start a blog. You can do it. It probably won’t change the world, but it might help you, and that’s a beginning.
  7. If you’re up for fiction, start with something short. There’s the six-word story, the 280-character story (twitterature), the dribble (50 words), the drabble (100 words), sudden fiction (750 words), or flash fiction (1000 words). Editors are looking for good stories of these lengths, and readers like them too.
  8. How about poetry? Can you make words sing, or fly, or lift a heart?
  9. Create a short story, with a few characters, or even just one. Focus on a single effect or mood. Editors and readers love well-written short stories. In fact, I know two editors searching for 3000-5000-word short stories inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Read the rules here, write your story, and send it in!
  10. Write a non-fiction book. You’re an expert in something. Perhaps you can expand that essay you wrote (see #5 above) to book length. Cookbooks, history books, coffee-table books, memoirs—they get bought all the time. Ooh, how about a travel book? Few people are traveling now, but everyone longs to.
  11. Write a children’s book, or YA (young adult). You’ll need a good imagination and the experience of having been young.
  12. Write the Great American Novel. As they say, writing a novel is a one-day event (as in ‘One day, I’ll write a novel’). You’ve got time now; excuses are gone. No need to wait for November; you can have a personal Nanowrimo now.

You may be cooped up, but your imagination isn’t, your words aren’t. Set them free! There’s no charge for this prescription for stir-craziness written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 22, 2020Permalink

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

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

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

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