#Jules Verne

[artificial-librarian]

For every note this gets I’ll travel 1 league under the sea.

[prokopetz]

Okay, so: in early drafts of Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo is a Polish guy bent on revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family in the January Uprising. Verne's editor objected on the grounds that Russia was a French ally at the time of the book's writing, and in the actual, published version of the story, Nemo's national origin and precisely which empire he's pissed off at are left unspecified.

Later, in the 1875 quasi-sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo is retconned as an Indian noble out for revenge against the British for the murder of his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – basically the same as the original plan, simply substituting a different uprising and a different empire. Verne's editor raised no objections this time around, because fuck the British, right? Though Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island aren't 100% compatible in their respective timelines, this version of Nemo has customarily been back-ported into adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues ever since.

Now here's the funny part: perhaps as a jab at his editor, Verne made a specific plot point in Twenty Thousand Leagues of Professor Aronnax repeatedly trying and failing to figure out where the fuck Nemo is from. At one point his attempt to pin down Nemo's accent is frustrated by Nemo's vast multilingualism. At another point, he tries and fails to trick Nemo by quizzing him about latitude and longitude.

(To contextualise that last bit, at the time the book was written, there was no international agreement on which line of longitude should be zero degrees, and many nations had their own prime meridians; Aronnax hoped to identify Nemo's national origin by calculating which meridian he was giving his longitudes relative to. Nemo, however, immediately spots the ploy, and announces that he'll use the Paris meridian in deference to the fact that Aronnax is a Frenchman.)

The upshot is that at no point in the course of any of this Sherlock Holmes bullshit does Aronnax ever bring up the colour of Nemo's skin as a potential clue. In light of the book's publication history, this is almost certainly simply because Verne hadn't decided that Nemo was Indian yet. However, taking into account The Mysterious Island's retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.

[weirdlookindog]

"Un de ces longs bras glissa par l’ouverture"

Alphonse de Neuville (1835-1885) - Long Arm Glided

Illustration from Jules Verne's "Twenty thousand leagues under the sea", 1870

[vintagegeekculture]

Jules Verne's striking tomb in Amiens shows him breaking out from his own grave and reaching to the sky, a sign of his immortality. Sculptor Albert Roze used Verne's own death mask to make the statue's face.

[20kmemesunderthesea]

In honor of Forduary.

[a-book-of-creatures]

Pittonaccio, the infernal clockmaker who winds up the Sun.

From Maitre Zacharius (Master Zacharius), one of Jules Verne’s forays into Hoffmannesque fantasy.

[nevver]

Around the Moon, Émile-Antoine Bayard (Ill.)

[dame-de-pique]

Jules Verne - From the Earth to the Moon

+++

[victusinveritas]

Illustrations by Zdenek Burian

[humanoidhistory]

John Berkey's cover art for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, 1970.

(via)

[catgirl-kaiju]

Odysseus and Captain Nemo hangin out like "there's no one here 🤣🤣🤣🤣" 💯

follow for more epic literature jokes

like to push Ron DeSantis into the raging sea to be dashed upon the rocks and feasted upon by gulls

reblog to give a trans girl huge tits

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Though Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” has a scientifically inaccurate title, his original title of “Journey to the Traversable Limit of the Asthenosphere” only sold 12 copies before the name was changed.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Nautilus - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

[weirdlookindog]

"Le poulpe brandissait la victime comme une plume"

Alphonse de Neuville (1835-1885) - Brandishing it's Victim

Illustration from Jules Verne's "Twenty thousand leagues under the sea", 1870

[bsd-bibliophile]

Perfume is the soul of the flower, and sea-flowers have no soul.

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

[20kmemesunderthesea]

Out-of-Context "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" Quotes to Put on Shirts:

-> "To be frank, I think that we're seeing things here that God wished to hide from man's eyes."

-> “Terrible avenger, a perfect archangel of hatred.”

-> “I declare it is easy to lead a snail's life.”

-> “I will not be eaten without protest!”

-> “The human mind enjoys impressive visions of unearthly creatures.”

-> “This precious carnivore, hunted and tracked by fishermen, is becoming extremely rare."