SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
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"20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne (BR)
read it a month or two ago. It was better than some of his others, but still full of incorrect science. Plus it's a bit slow in places.Historical Note: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is actually a mistranslation as it should be 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas (plural for seas) and is the distance traveled on the journey, not the distance the vessel was beneath the sea
I've been eyeing this, curious as to should I take part. I will see if I can fit it in somewhere.
Is there a particular version you're reading? Apparently there are several & one of the early ones was pretty bad. I'm reading it with another group in October & there was a lot of discussion about this when choosing the book. I think the Wikipedia page has a good description of the editions.
CBRetriever wrote: "read it a month or two ago. It was better than some of his others, but still full of incorrect science. Plus it's a bit slow in places.Historical Note: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is actually a ..."
Yes -- I'm aware of that, but most of the English versions have "sea" instead of "seas," so I figured it would be easier for people that way. Of COURSE it's full of incorrect science! It was written in 1869! Still interesting to see what was considered "science" back then, though.
Jim wrote: "Is there a particular version you're reading? Apparently there are several & one of the early ones was pretty bad. I'm reading it with another group in October & there was a lot of discussion about..."I'm reading/listening to the version translated by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. It's considered one of the better versions.
Jemppu wrote: "I've been eyeing this, curious as to should I take part. I will see if I can fit it in somewhere."I've half considered reading it in the original French, but I don't have time.
Alex wrote: "...I've half considered reading it in the original French, but I don't have time."Ooh. If I could, I certainly would ^^
I'll be joining closer to the date. My version is translated but is also apparently abridged (I got it at a used book sale). I was a little bummed when I realized that, but I'll go ahead and read anyway. Maybe I'll find out what I'm missing too.
I honestly think it’ll be fascinating to see the differences between the translations and editions.
I'll have to check. Hmm it says translated by Translated by Lewis Mercier but it does say "A dozen diving apparatuses hung from the partition waiting our use."
and refers to
"There was a vast difference noticeable between these consummate apparatuses and the old cork breastplates, jackets, and other contrivances in vogue during the eighteenth century."
so I'm presuming it's the Arlington edition.
Just found a recent German translation for € 0.99 :D. That settles my decision. But I will be quite slowly in reading and of course won't quote. (To read it in French would take me the rest of the year ...)
Yeah, the Mercier is supposed to be the worst (and also the most common). I'm reading the Butcher in Jim's group; I'll try to remember to come here with my thoughts, too.
Finished! Rating: 3.5 rounded up to 4, on account of Michael Prichard's narration.
I'll leave the review, comments, etc. until later. :)
Among other translations not mentioned on Wikipedia is one by Mendor T. Brunetti. He was a professor of Romance Languages, so one presumes his grasp of French was good. He claims that the translation is unabridged (as did the publisher on the back cover of the first edition). It is certainly much fuller than many other translations/editions I've consulted.I have no idea of how well it compares with more recent translations. I've read it several times since the 1970s, and found it rather smooth reading, although I can see why some technical passages were cut by translators and/or their editors, especially when the edition was aimed at children.
On the technical side, Brunetti also says that, since Verne sometimes offered equivalents to the metric system (English and specifically nautical), he has made the practice systematic: which is nice if the reader, like me, can't work it out without stopping for some arithmetic, or flipping to a less than helpful conversion table at the front of the book.
It is getting a little old, and may be behind the times in terms of Verne scholarship: it was published in the Signet Classics series in 1969, and got a revised and expanded (but still short) bibliography in 1981.
At some point it was given a new introduction by Stephen Baxter, and an afterword by Walter James, so the current Signet edition is about 80 pages longer than their first, which could throw you off if you are looking for a used copy (384 versus 464 pages, according to Amazon). I don't know if the translation was re-edited. Amazon claims that it was published in the later form in 2010, and may be correct.
Among a bunch of other translations and formats confusingly offered on the same page it can be found on Amazon, apparently in a mass-market paperback, which may or may not be available. I would take care in ordering from dealers: some of the confusion is probably on their end, and not on Amazon's.
https://www.amazon.com/000-Leagues-Un...
@IanThe Signet Classic 1981 translation (I got it on Project Gutenberg for free) is the one I was e-reading, whilst listening to the Mercier translation. It was bizarre to do both at the same time. I had to flip regularly, to keep up with Mercier's translation, where he skips lines, paragraphs, and sometimes whole pages. I'd pause the audio at times, just to go back and see what was taken out. It was mostly the technical passages, as you said, but at times it was overly verbose descriptions of the sea and its inhabitants.
One of these days I should just read it in French.
I've also been reading the relatively recent F.P. Walter translation, which has been made available to the public, and is available in free and inexpensive forms, including some Kindle versions. At least one of them is with illustrations originally from an edition aimed at a younger readership. There are too many editions on Goodreads to call it up easily: the Amazon page for it is https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Thousan...Passage for passage it pretty much agrees with the older Brunetti (Signet Classics) translation, but the language seems to me more colloquial.
With the digital forms of the Walter version, there is also the advantage that the size of text can be altered. The hard-copy Signet version I have is in what I now find to be rather small print: I don't think that bothered me in 1970 or so.
And with very narrow pages margins, too: possibly someone was trying to cram the complete version into a minimal number of pages, which someone else responsible for book design had decided on in advance. As it is 380 pages as it stands, it could have made a rather thick book for a late 1960s paperback. Paperback publishers back then often assumed that such volumes would be intimidating to their target audiences, and abridgements were frequent. Of course, it also kept down costs, at a time when paperbacks were very low-priced, and the profit margin was probably pretty thin.
(Some of my High-School teachers tended to disapprove of paperback editions in general for this reason, although in one class we used a paperback edition of "War and Peace" precisely because it was mercilessly cut -- and, if I recall correctly, was "Bowdlerized," so no love affairs, etc., of any significance were left in.)
Ian wrote: "I've also been reading the relatively recent F.P. Walter translation, which has been made available to the public, and is available in free and inexpensive forms, including some Kindle versions. At..."I'm reading that version, too. I got it for free as an audibook by Librivox here:
https://librivox.org/twenty-thousand-...
It's well narrated.
Started last night and I'm about a third of the way through. It's rollicking right along, (view spoiler)
CBRetriever wrote: "read it a month or two ago. It was better than some of his others, but still full of incorrect science. Plus it's a bit slow in places.Historical Note: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is actually a ..."
Thanks for the Historical Note, CB, I did not know that!
Over halfway. I kind of like the lists of plants or shells and the taxonomies, though I do admit I skim them. I'm not into the technology with all the numbers, though, and I skim those very lightly. And there a few bits where we get to know the characters' personalities, and those are fun (some are even funny).I really like the Butcher... reads easily like a modern book but still very clearly evokes the older language and syntax. Except for one point with the use of the word "ok." Yes, I know it was used back then, but it just seemed off in context.
that route of the Nautilus isn't correct according to the book. In the book they went though the Red Sea and then through underground below where the Suez canal was being built to the Mediterranean. Captain Nemo called it the Arabian tunnel
The better translations use "seas" instead of "sea" in the title, which makes much more sense. Even as a child I knew the title couldn't be referring to depth, and was so put off by that nonsense that I never read the book.
John wrote: "I'm not surprised it isn't 100% accurate, there are not a lot of images of his actual route, so I just grabbed the one that looked the best. I'm not even sure what publication this image comes from."The original maps as drawn by Verne are here:
http://jv.gilead.org.il/sfs/Harpold/
but the images on this wikipedia article are better
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_...
as you can embiggen them
Slower read because I keep taking note of things. I ran out of bookdarts so I'll add some of the quotes here. I don't think they're spoilery out of context, but I'll hide them anyway for the truly sensitive. Everyone else can click through. (view spoiler)
Would any of you welcome this undersea adventure, if it meant you wouldn't be able to see or communicate with people on land for an indefinite length of time? I cannot imagine how I'd feel.
I've started now. The translation I'm reading is a bit awkward - some phrasings and orthography where I'm not sure if this is older German or simply bad editing. But overall it gives a good feeling of the tone of the time like I had with the Wells' books. Yet Verne's prose seems to be more at great length and not self-deprecating, so the feeling is a bit dry.
There is some science in here that seems innovative. Nemo put copper rings on fishes' tails in one sea, and was gratified to find those banded fishes in an adjacent sea, proving a subtle connection of the two and the fishes' movements.All I can readily find about the history of banding is summed here (from Wikipedia, because other sources were fragmented).
"In North America John James Audubon and Ernest Thompson Seton were pioneers although their method of marking birds was different from modern ringing. In order to determine if the same bird would return to his farm, Audubon tied silver threads onto the legs of young eastern phoebes in 1805 ..., while Seton marked snow buntings in Manitoba with ink in 1882.[7] Ringing of birds for more extensive scientific purposes was started in 1899 by Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, a Danish schoolteacher, using aluminum rings on European starlings...."
thanks for doing that highlighting - it makes it easier to see
Gabi, I'm finding the Butcher translation a nice clean easy read and I do recommend it. Even though in the introduction Butcher says "it's not science fiction." (I assume he has a much narrower definition of SF than I do!)
Cheryl wrote: "Gabi, I'm finding the Butcher translation a nice clean easy read and I do recommend it. Even though in the introduction Butcher says "it's not science fiction." (I assume he has a much narrower def..."Thanks for the rec, but I'm using this chance to read in German once in a while.
The enthusiasm about killing makes it hard for me to enjoy the book so far. That's a mindset that is not the least appealing to me.
it was the manly thing to do back in the time when the book was written. Even today, it's common in some parts of the world amongst some groups: upper class Englishmen chasing foxes, folks in the Appalachians in the US hunting raccoons, etc. And there were very few conservation/save the animal movements.It's a bit odd since I understand that Verne was anti-war in his sentiments.
CBRetriever wrote: "it was the manly thing to do back in the time when the book was written..."Not just 'the manly thing', but also needed at times. When a farmer is trying to raise livestock, it's a problem when the wildlife decides his farm is the larder & most of the people did some sort of farming back then & relied on it.
Wildlife is often a problem today. My neighbor got licensed to spotlight coons when they ate up his cornfield a few years ago. He got a couple of dozen in one week. Even after that sort of slaughter, he had issues & we had half a dozen that wound up bothering us in the middle of the night, one breaking through the screen in the kitchen window. He was happily munching on dog biscuits on the kitchen counter before my wife & the dogs chased him out. Every year yearlings migrate through & sometimes tear up stuff in the grooming area of the horse barn. The feed is in metal trash cans, so I guess they get frustrated & take it out on whatever they can.
Mom gave up raising chickens in the early 2000s due to the number of hawks. When I was a kid, we'd rarely see them & the chickens could run free. Sometime in the late 80s, we had to start building them pens with netting on top. A couple of decades later too many hawks were getting caught in the netting.
The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt and His Adventures in the Wilderness does a pretty good job of describing the thinking about naturalism & environmentalism in the US 30 years or so after 20K was published . It's instructive, if frustrating to my modern sensibilities.
Chapter 13. - death by too much information! This is such a contrast to the witty HG Wells. I have the feeling I'm reading through a technical manual.ETA: followed by an excerpt from a biology book in chapter 14 ...
Gabi wrote: "...I have the feeling I'm reading through a technical manual...."That seems a good description of it in many parts of it.
Jemppu wrote: "Gabi wrote: "...I have the feeling I'm reading through a technical manual...."That seems a good description of it in many parts of it."
I admit, I started skimming now. ^^'
Cheryl wrote: "Gabi, I'm finding the Butcher translation a nice clean easy read and I do recommend it. Even though in the introduction Butcher says "it's not science fiction." (I assume he has a much narrower definition of SF than I do!)..."It would be quite a feat if Butcher provided a coherent definition of science fiction which somehow excludes Verne's projection of near-future technologies, which has long served other restrictive definitions as the ideal template for the field.
The alternative explanation that first comes to mind is that Butcher simply has not read much science fiction because he knows in advance it isn't any good, or at least that he won't like it. And, when he does read some, and likes it, concludes that it isn't really science fiction, but something else.
Digression on background:
This is a fallacy which has been around for almost a century, at least, since the term "science fiction" (or "scientifiction") was coined for a genre appearing in specialized magazines, which immediately attracted the contempt reserved by the literary elite for popular fiction in general -- with the exception in some instances of detective stories, despite their appearance in pulp magazines from the same publishers, and sometimes the same editors.
A lot of the early magazine science fiction really was pretty poor, but some of it is still readable, if a bit quaint in its assumptions about the future.
Payment was minute, and people with a technical background often lacked literary skills, and vice versa. And some of the better works went to the higher-paying "slick" magazines, like the Saturday Evening Post, before their editors recognized it as "science fiction," and therefore not any good.
The syndicated comic strips of "Buck Rogers" and "Flash Gordon" didn't help, either. Even though the Sunday strips of the latter were among the most beautiful examples of the genre, and "Buck Rogers" in the 1930s threw in references to rockets and atomic bombs, which admittedly was more impressive in retrospect than at the time.
For the rejection of science fiction as "sub-literary" in academic circles in particular, see T.A. Shippey's 2016 collection of essays, "Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction" (free download by way of a link at https://www.academia.edu/39500261/Har...). *
Tom Shippey, a professor of Old and Middle English, is one of the leading Tolkien scholars, and also a long-time SF fan: the first essay in the volume is "Coming Out of the Science Fiction Closet," and the next two are also relevant.
*Academia.edu provides free downloads of tons of mostly academic articles and even books, but is a commercial site. It requires registration, which is free, and allows the software to suggest related articles which might have been missed, but some people object to having such information tracked.
More annoyingly, it now constantly promotes its "Premium Service," which is NOT free, and has taken to bombarding users with spam e-mails claiming that "[Your Name] has been mentioned" in an article or articles, and you can locate them by subscribing. Useful for those trying to impress tenure committees with the value of their work: but, according to a number of reports, this is often completely untrue, and just serves as an incentive to subscribe and find out for yourself. (If it really bothers you, you can always cancel.)
Gabi wrote: "Chapter 13. - death by too much information! This is such a contrast to the witty HG Wells. I have the feeling I'm reading through a technical manual."Wells liked to toss out an idea and leave it to his readers to accept it while reading the story. (This is known as "the willing suspension of disbelief," a formulation by Coleridge in his "Biographia Literaria".) He would throw in incidental details where he thought the story needed them, and ignore scientific facts if they got in the way. (E.g., the "gravity screen" in "First Men in the Moon.")
Verne's original reputation was based an a certain degree of realism and plausibility in his stories, notably in the 1863 blockbuster "Five Weeks in a Balloon," which involved a steerable airship of sorts (not yet the rigid dirigible, but similar in concept). Verne, or his publisher, who had a lot of influence on the books, tried to maintain that impression by including still more verbal blue-prints of imaginary inventions in other "Extraordinary Voyages."
To those of us who can look up the statistics of real submarines, and in any case don't need to be persuaded of their existence, it is definitely overkill.
Another factor to be kept in mind in Verne's discussion of underwater life and landscapes is that he was writing for a readership with little, if any, acquaintance with oceanographic research (such as it was), even if, like Ned Land, they knew quite a bit about sailing on the surface.
No color photographs in popular magazines, no Jacques Cousteau documentaries (for those of us who remember them), no televised exploration of the wreck of the Titanic -- everything had to be expressed verbally, with the possible assistance of some black-and-white illustrations by artists who were probably themselves ignorant, and had only Verne's descriptions to go on.
(I've seen some illustrations in juvenile editions of the book in which the more recent artist has obviously failed to consult an encyclopedia, but went by the truncated version of the text he was given....)
Alex wrote: "Jemppu wrote: "I've been eyeing this, curious as to should I take part. I will see if I can fit it in somewhere."I've half considered reading it in the original French, but I don't have time."
Step 1: Spend three years learning French.
Step 2: Read book.
Step 3: Come back here in 2022 to necropost.
*hah* An option. Does three years' level of French suffice with all the tech talk though, I wonder.
Cheryl wrote: "Would any of you welcome this undersea adventure, if it meant you wouldn't be able to see or communicate with people on land for an indefinite length of time? I cannot imagine how I'd feel."Yes. I can go without talking to people indefinitely.
20k (as we cool kids call it) sparked my interest in visiting Antarctica. I first read the book when I was 9 (1974) and I might actually get to that continent next year. When using telephony to chat with my mom the other night I mentioned my travel plans and she recalled that I talked about going to Antarctica all the time as a boy. Apparently I was a wee bit obsessed back in the day.
Gabi wrote: "Chapter 13. - death by too much information! This is such a contrast to the witty HG Wells. I have the feeling I'm reading through a technical manual.ETA: followed by an excerpt from a biology bo..."
Have you ever read Moby-Dick, or, the Whale? Melville has a chapter dedicated just to rope. 😂 In which he manages to be racist. About rope. 😶
Cheryl wrote: "Then there's Verne's mistaken idea of man's role in Earth's ecology."[T]he supply [of pearl oysters in the bedding grounds] was inexhaustible, for nature's creative power is beyond man's destruc..."
To eyes of that era, it must have seemed as if the natural world was beyond man’s ability to make a dent. Cape Cod in Massachusetts is so named because the cod were so plentiful you didn’t even need to fish for them: they would literally jump into your boat. Now they’re all but extinct.
I saw a photo from ~1900 of hundreds of thousands of sea turtles on a beach somewhere and you can’t see the sand at all. Plus, each turtle was the size of a full-grown man. Now they’re half that size and we’re lucky if they are a dozen in any one spawning area. In Australia they used to ride the turtles for fun, “racing” them. When I was on that beach in 2013 the guide said they hadn’t seen a turtle in 5 years.
As for the Nautilus, since he was writing before the advent of mass production and the concept of “standardized parts” was still pretty new, it’s no wonder he assumed such a thing would be rare. It makes me wonder what assumptions we have about the world today that future generations will look askance at.
“You mean that performed surgery by CUTTING YOU OPEN?! Why didn’t they just use nanites like civilized people?”
“Why is everyone in this book starving to death? Why don’t they just print more food? 1 Star!”
Trike wrote: "Have you ever read Moby-Dick, or, the Whale? Melville has a chapter dedicated just to rope. 😂 In which he manages to be racist. About rope. 😶..."Chapter 60 is one of several highly technical digressions, including such things as the exact interior layout of a whaleboat, which turn up again in the final chapters as a given. (The Norton Critical Edition, probably among others, has a diagram of the boat, which helps tremendously in following the description.)
And rope was/is a huge factor on a sailing ship, and, as Melville makes abundantly clear, specialized ropes were especially important -- critical -- in whaling.
(I would compare it to a discussion of possible causes of the failure of brake pads in a murder mystery involving an automobile "accident.")
Yes, the comparison of tarred hemp to a Manila line as an Indian to a Circassian is weird by our standards. But the use of human physical appearance as a standard of comparison for inanimate objects seems to have been not uncommon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Jemppu wrote: "*hah* An option. Does three years' level of French suffice with all the tech talk though, I wonder."
Probably not. My native language is French, while my wife (from the Dominican Republic) has lived in Quebec Province for over 35 years now, and she still has problems getting all the subtleties of French grammar. She is easily fluent in spoken French and is an intelligent woman, but she still needs my help from time to time to review and correct letters and emails she made in French. Unless you are a linguistic prodigee, give yourself a good five years or more to be able to fully understand a technical text in French. Sorry if this could discourage you.
Probably not. My native language is French, while my wife (from the Dominican Republic) has lived in Quebec Province for over 35 years now, and she still has problems getting all the subtleties of French grammar. She is easily fluent in spoken French and is an intelligent woman, but she still needs my help from time to time to review and correct letters and emails she made in French. Unless you are a linguistic prodigee, give yourself a good five years or more to be able to fully understand a technical text in French. Sorry if this could discourage you.
Trike wrote: "Have you ever read Moby-Dick, or, the Whale? Melville has a chapter dedicated just to rope. 😂 In which he manages to be racist. About rope. 😶 ..."Nope, nobody could tell me if the whale survives or not - so I didn't read it.
Jemppu wrote: "*hah* An option. Does three years' level of French suffice with all the tech talk though, I wonder."advantage of a Kindle and the French dictionary and the French to English dictionary
Gabi wrote: "Trike wrote: "Have you ever read Moby-Dick, or, the Whale? Melville has a chapter dedicated just to rope. 😂 In which he manages to be racist. About rope. 😶 ..."Nope, nobody could tell me if the whale survives or not - so I didn't read it."
That’s because Melville doesn’t say. He is harpooned — a *lot* — but he kills all the whale hunters and smashes their ship to bits. Maybe he died of his wounds, but he’d survived such encounters before. (Which is why Ahab was after him.)
I did see a funny cartoon once (the Far Side, maybe?) where people whale-watching see a white whale... with a human skeleton strapped to its side. 😆
Trike wrote: "I did see a funny cartoon once (the Far Side, maybe?) where people whale-watching see a white whale... with a human skeleton strapped to its side. 😆 ..."I think I recall the same cartoon. As a visual, it appropriately referenced the 1956 motion picture version, not the novel.
As for the whale winning (in a spectacular fashion), that was based on a real incident, most recently described for the general public in Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (1999). For the original documentation, as edited by Philbrick, see The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale
As Philbrick points out, there is at least one other example of a whale attacking a whaling ship. He points out that these may not have been acts of revenge by the whales in question. In both cases the ship was almost unoccupied, and mostly silent, but a carpenter was hard at work on repairs. The repetitive hammering, heard through the water, may have sounded like a challenge from another male.
I have no idea whether Verne was familiar with the Essex affair: I would think he would have referred to it if he did.
By the way, Verne's ideas about whales were a bit strange. He seems to have confused the Sperm Whale ("Cachalot") with the Killer Whale (properly the Orca), sometimes known as the Whale Killer. They have in common being whales with teeth, but do not share feeding behaviors.
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1 (other topics)The Eternal Adam (other topics)
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In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (other topics)
The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale (other topics)
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