Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, published in French as Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers, is a science fiction adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, serialized between March 1869 and June 1870 and published in book form in 1870. Set in 1866, it opens as a mysterious sea creature begins attacking ships around the world, prompting a French marine biologist, Professor Pierre Aronnax, to join an American expedition sent to hunt it down; when the creature turns out to be a technologically advanced submarine, the Nautilus, Aronnax, his servant Conseil and the harpooner Ned Land are taken aboard as permanent, half-willing guests of its enigmatic commander, Captain Nemo. Over the following months the Nautilus carries them across the world's oceans, past coral reefs and sunken ships, through an encounter with giant squid, and even to the legendary ruins of Atlantis, while Nemo's own tragic history as an exiled political figure driven to reject the surface world gradually comes into view, before the three companions finally make their escape near the coast of Norway. Celebrated for its detailed and, for its time, strikingly accurate imagining of submarine technology, the novel is considered one of Verne's masterworks and a foundational text of modern science fiction, notable also for its early ecological sensibility toward the ocean it explores.