Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Three men hunting a sea monster are taken aboard it and discover it is a submarine, privately built, self-sufficient, and captained by a stateless man with a grievance against the surface world. The voyage is an inventory of the ocean; the plot is the slow realisation that their host is not a scientist who happens to be armed but a combatant who happens to do science. Nemo remains the template for every engineer-villain since.

Context: a16z point to the Nautilus as evidence of Verne’s method — “a fully realized submarine design,” worked out in enough detail that the ship functions as a real piece of infrastructure with power, air, food and maintenance. The submarine is the point; the monster is the marketing.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — where this is listed, in the classics tier.
• Jules Verne — the author.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days — the other three Verne titles on the list.
• Science Fiction — the genre.