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Originally Posted by fantasyfan
In fact, the great submarine is more vivid and realistic than any of the characters aside from Nemo. The Captain stands out with a mysterious charisma. The other main figures are rather one-dimensional--especially the {for me} intensely irritating Ned Land. Conseil gets on my nerves with his constant references to "Master" and the Professor himself suffers the fate of many novelistic narrators in that he becomes subsumed into the story as a plot mechanism.
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I take all the gentlemen's point about technology and I gave Verne his due, I thought! Reading about it was never my cuppa, and I'm willing to grant that it's unrealistic for me to expect more plot and character. I liked Ned the best,
fanasyfan, since to me he was understandable. "Get me off this thing!" I had very high hopes initially for the development of Nemo's backstory. Another reason I liked Ned was that ultimately I held him less complicit in whatever evil Nemo visited on his enemies. No matter what the provocation and his history, even Nemo surely knew that the lackeys on the ships of his enemy were not in control of their destiny or responsible for the tragedies that had befallen him. I think this is what bugged me; I smelled a powerful story, but Verne only hinted at it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WillAdams
Very fitting that the U.S. Navy named the first nuclear submarine USS Nautilus (SSN-571) (and a previous WW-II era SS-168) for it. Wonder what happened to my plastic model of it....
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One of my greatest pleasures in reading this was realizing how very apropos was the name of the nuclear Nautilus. I read a lot about polar exploration as a kid and understood that it had been named after the submarine in
20,000. I had no idea that when the USS Nautilus was the first submarine to penetrate the North Pole in the late 1950s, it was merely aping the antics of its namesake at the South Pole a century earlier.