"Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne (aka Adam Roberts...)



2014 is going to be the year to read lots of new authors. Robert Adams was on my TBR pile since I can remember. Now was the time. Finally.

Having not read his previous work, I was just plain flabbergasted by this novel’s technical expertise.

The brain surely works in mysterious ways. While reading it, I kept thinking about Arthur C. Clarke. The same kind of narrative wonder is on display here. Unfortunately some problems make the novel less than totally enjoyable (see “Things that I did not like” below).

I sense that for Adam Roberts a lot of the appeal of science fiction isn't exactly in the science.


You can read the rest of this review on my blog. ( )

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After reading this book, no-one will be able to deny the fact that's a weird book.

It's just so weird. During its first voyage the Plongeur, a French nuclear submarine, something goes horribly wrong. The vessel keeps sinking far past the depths that would normally crush the submarine. Far past the normal depth of the oceans.

One thing became painfully clear to me when reading this novel; I don't know enough about the classics. Because this is almost a retelling or an updated version of the original Jules Verne novel I suspect it's filled with references that I didn't get. Some things I googled and thus found, others will be lost forever on me. For that part I'm to blame.

But on the other hand, the story could never really hold my interest. It felt very long, even though the story itself wasn't that long (considered in pages). There are also 30 something pages filled with drawings that I didn't found that special. The ending was really lost on me (I suspect it might have been another reference). At the end, I was just glad the journey was over, for the crew as much as for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! ( )

Roberts is a very clever man, and a thoroughly nice chap. But for some reason I’ve never quite connected with his novels. The closest I’ve managed to date was Jack Glass, although I did really like the first half of Yellow Blue Tibia – but, I hasten to add, I’ve not read every novel he’s written, and I still have a few on the TBR. However, I do admire and enjoy his short fiction. Unfortunately, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea is a novel. A very nicely illustrated novel, too. In 1958, France’s first nuclear-powered submarine, Le Plongeur, is on its sea trials when something goes wrong during a dive, and the submarine continues to descend… to an impossible depth, tens of thousands of kilometres. The meagre crew aboard speculate on their predicament, there are small mutinies, and many mysteries. I very much liked this story – I have in fact written something similar myself in short story form – but felt Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea was marred by too many things that were just plain wrong. Not only does the novel claim nine thousand metres is “nearly a full kilometre”, or that titanium is stronger than steel, or that no part of the sea-bed is deeper than 10,000 metres (Challenger Deep is nearly 11,000 metres, as recorded by a 1951 survey), but a French naval officer would have known of the Trieste, given that the French Navy bought August Piccard’s earlier bathyscaphe FNRS-2 in 1950 (and operated it under the name FNRS-3, even setting a new depth record of 4,050 metres in 1954)… Besides all that, the novel repeatedly confuses metres and kilometres. Le Plongeur sinks at one metre a second, so attaining a depth of 90,000 km in three days is impossible. Ninety thousand metres, yes. But not ninety thousand kilometres. But not only does the prose repeatedly refer to this figure, it also compares it to the diameter of the Earth. There are other small details, like a hatch that open inwards, and so the pressure of the water would be continually acting to force it open; or an airlock on the keel of the submarine; or even a nuclear reactor directly driving the propeller (that’s not how nuclear-powered submarines work – the reactor generates heat, which powers a turbine, which turns the propellor shaft). These slips (also, a character briefly possessing two left hands), which should have been picked up by an editor, aside, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea is a typical Roberts piece. There’s a reason Le Plongeur is where it is, and even a sort of scientific explanation for the presence of so much water. There are some odd bits, like carnivorous fish which don’t appear to have an ecosystem to support them, before the submarine and its remaining crew reach their (unbeknownst to most of them) planned destination and the, er, whole point of the book. Given the novel’s title, the identity of the person they meet there should come as no surprise. The reason for the journey relies on a somewhat stretched scientific analogy, but it’s easy enough to swallow. In fact, for a tall tale, and it is very much a tall tale, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea is very easy to swallow. Perhaps it feels a bit over-long in places, but the cast of (mostly) grotesques are amusing and well-written, and the final pay-off is worth the long descent. Oh, and the illustrations, by Mahendra Singh, are very good. ( )

It is the year 1958 and the French experimental nuclear submarine, Plongeur, has embarked on its maiden voyage. Everything goes as expected until it reaches 1000 leagues below the surface. At this point, the crew attempts to begin the ascent but systems begin to fail. The sub continues to descend and, as they reach the point that the water pressure should crush it, the crew is forced to face what they perceive as the inevitable end to their adventure and they try to make their peace through confession, something which the reader suspects is likely to come back to bite them because the sub keeps sinking down and down farther than any of them (or at least most of them) could imagine into what they begin to suspect is an infinite ocean:

“The crew watched with fascination, and then horror, and finally with boredom as the numbers continued their relentless accumulation.”

As they continue to sink into this unknown world and it becomes more and more likely that they will never return home, the crew begins to fall apart with infighting, suspicion, accusations, religious mania, and even murder.

Okay, confession time – I have never read Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea so I have no idea how author Adam Robert’s novel, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea, stacks up beyond the rather larger number of leagues. I also don’t read a lot of speculative fiction so I can’t say whether this works as such. I will say that I enjoyed this book a lot. It is well-written with plenty of action and even some humour. Although most of the crew tended to be somewhat one-dimensional their descent both in physical and mental terms was both compelling and chilling and was fascinating to ‘watch’. The one exception to the one-dimension rule was Lebret who seems to be both hero and villain and it is never completely clear which is true.

Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea is the kind of book that makes the reader think, that posits big questions, and gives unexpected outcomes. And if that isn’t enough, there are some marvelous full-page illustrations by Mahendra Singh that both complement and add texture to the story. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2015/01/review-of-twenty-trillion-leagues-under... ( )