For Fans of Jules Verne

Nemo is brilliant, principled, wounded, and dangerous. He has renounced the surface world for reasons Verne deliberately keeps murky across two novels, and that ambiguity is what makes him unforgettable. He feeds the poor with the ocean's abundance, wages private war on the navies that wronged him, and shows genuine tenderness toward Aronnax even while holding him prisoner. Modern storytelling is still trying to write this character.

Phileas Fogg's precise, almost robotic itinerary, combined with Detective Fix's dogged pursuit across three continents, gives Around the World in Eighty Days its propulsive energy. Strip away the exotic settings and what remains is a chase story with a ticking clock, a man with everything to lose, and an antagonist operating on false assumptions. The comedy of manners is the sugar coating; the thriller mechanics underneath are what keep pages turning.

Failbetter Games built their Victorian underwater world out of fragments: port encounters, crew morale, fuel and provisions, and a narrative voice that rewards curiosity and punishes recklessness. The feeling of piloting a fragile vessel into unmapped waters, knowing that knowledge is the only currency that matters, is as close to the Nemo experience as games have managed. The prose alone is worth the journey.

Scorsese's Hugo is nominally about Georges Melies and the birth of cinema, but its emotional core is the same as Verne's: the conviction that the universe is full of mechanisms waiting to be understood, and that the right mind, given enough curiosity and courage, can unlock any of them. The film treats invention and wonder as moral goods. Verne would have approved.