Overview

Something is attacking ships in the world's oceans. It is fast, nearly indestructible, and capable of punching holes through iron hulls. The scientific consensus, led by Professor Pierre Aronnax of the Paris Museum of Natural History, is that it must be a creature - a narwhal of extraordinary size, perhaps, something evolved in the ocean's unexplored depths. The consensus is wrong. It is not a creature. It is the Nautilus. And once Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land find themselves aboard it - guests, prisoners, the distinction is never quite established - they will not be going home until Captain Nemo decides they will. Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, and it remains the most fully realized of all his creations: a novel in which the scientific imagination and the moral imagination operate at the same pitch of intensity, in which the wonders of the underwater world - the kelp forests, the drowned city of Atlantis glimpsed through a porthole, the South Pole reached by submarine - are inseparable from the question of the man who has made that world his permanent exile. Captain Nemo is one of the great figures of nineteenth-century fiction: a man of extraordinary cultivation and extraordinary fury, who has withdrawn from the human world for reasons the novel circles without fully revealing, and whose inner life remains finally unresolved - as oceanic, as deep, and as dark as the element he inhabits. Twenty thousand leagues is the distance traveled. It is, to be precise, roughly twice the circumference of the Earth, conducted entirely below the surface, in a vessel that had never existed before Verne imagined it. This edition presents the complete text - restoring the chapters and passages removed by earlier English translations - so that the novel can be read as Verne wrote it, in its full scientific and human complexity. Inexhaustible, strange, and as deep as it promises.

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