Every Version of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers

The novel that invented the submarine thriller

Jules Verne published Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) in serial form in 1869 and 1870, then as a complete novel in two volumes from Hetzel. It grew from a single inversion: what if the mysterious sea monster terrorising shipping lanes was actually a machine? The result was one of the founding texts of science fiction, a novel that gave readers Captain Nemo, the Nautilus, and the fantasy of breathing, eating, and living on the ocean floor, years before the first practical submarine had been built.

Verne's story follows Professor Pierre Aronnax, his manservant Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land, taken aboard Nemo's extraordinary vessel after a collision at sea. What follows is less a plot-driven thriller than a travelogue of the deep: coral graveyards, a sunken Atlantis, the South Pole under the ice. Nemo himself is the engine of the book's lasting fascination, a man of genius and unresolved fury, stateless and beyond law, readable as romantic rebel or early terrorist depending on your sympathies.

The novel has been translated, adapted, sequelised, and reimagined continuously for 150 years. The 1954 Disney film fixed the visual grammar most people still carry in their heads. Anime, graphic novels, stage musicals, and at least a dozen film and television versions have followed. No two quite agree on who Nemo is or what he wants, which is probably why the story keeps getting remade.