e are in Nantes, France, in the year 1840, and our attention centers on three adolescents. Jules Verne is the the dreamy son of a middle-class lawyer. André Nemo is a common laborer's offspring. And Caroline Aronnax hails from a rich merchant's family. The multiplex intertwined lives of these three chums over the next 30 years form the tale which K.J. Anderson—better known to millions as Kevin Anderson, author of several Star Wars and Dune books—wishes to spin, inventing a biography for Jules Verne's most famous character while also limning the artistic development of the French grandfather of science fiction.
The action commences quickly, and never really lets up. Nemo's father perishes in a work-related explosion, and the orphaned boy is forced to ship out to sea. Caroline manages to use her father's influence to get Nemo a better-than-average berth on an English scientific expedition. But halfway through its journey, the ship is overtaken by pirates and its crew and captain slaughtered. Nemo alone escapes, to spend several years on a desert island.
Meanwhile, back in France, Verne and Caroline pine for their seemingly dead friend even as their lives go on. Verne is reluctantly pressed into following his father's lawyerly footsteps, relocating to Paris for his education. Here his literary inclinations will first be sparsely watered, mainly by a friendship with Alexandre Dumas. Caroline, who aspires to be a composer, is instead forced into a loveless marriage with a much older man. But Nemo will soon miraculously resurface in their lives, after an underground escape from his South Pacific island that takes him all the way to Iceland!
Once all three adults are established in Paris, with Nemo serving as an engineer under Napoleon III, further adventures ensue. Caroline's explorer husband has been long lost in the arctic, and she
uses her new freedom to accompany Nemo and a British balloonist on a five-week trip across wildest Africa. On this expedition, Nemo and Caroline realize that they are fated for each other, but also that they must restrain their impulses until the end of the seven-year wait to declare Caroline's husband legally dead. Verne, who also loves Caroline, takes this news hard, and finds little solace in his stymied literary career.
When Nemo enlists to fight in the Crimean War, a sharp detour occurs that will change everything. Pulled from the wreckage of the Charge of the Light Brigade, Nemo finds himself and two dozen other Europeans captive to the Turkish Caliph Robur, who bids the men construct a military submarine at his secret base in the Middle East. Long years pass, during which Verne finally achieves commercial success with his novels—by liberally adapting his boyhood friend's personal history! Caroline remains an unmarried independent businesswoman. But when Nemo and his crew finally escape in the Nautilus, embarking on "war against War," it seems that the third member of their society has distanced himself forever from civilized life. How Nemo returns to a Paris wracked by the Franco-Prussian War for a final encounter with Caroline and Verne forms the climax of the tale.
Art imitates life imitates art
Kevin Anderson has set himself a daunting task: to somehow fit the incredible, counterfactual exploits of Verne's Byronic hero Captain Nemo into the actual life of Jules Verne and the consensus history of the 19th century. Moreover, most of the other "extraordinary voyages" penned by Verne, even those not involving Nemo, will also be shoehorned into the story. Obviously, some elaborate fudging is going to have to occur. But to his credit, Anderson manages to unite the majority of these disparate threads into one convincing tapestry. In this book, Nemo's exploits are generally just primitive analogues of what we know from Verne's novels, where his imagination took sway and elaborated magnificently. By this method, Anderson manages to render a story which is thrilling, yet still mostly naturalistic and non-fantastic, save for the final segment involving the Nautilus.
Thus Nemo's stay on his desert island becomes a quintessential Robinsonade, without any bizarre events. Until, of course, a volcanic explosion opens up an underground world populated with atavistic dinosaurs. But even this segment does not involve any wild "hollow earth" stuff, and reads like straightforward spelunking. Likewise, Nemo and Caroline's African balloon trip is accomplished without any super-science. It is only during the creation of the Nautilus—and its unrecorded career of sinking warships—that events transcend textbook history and science, and leap into the truly speculative. But even here, Anderson repudiates Verne's wildest extremes. For instance, Robur has also built a huge cannon to launch a spaceship to the moon. But the resulting "shot heard round the world" only succeeds in destroying the device and sending the gravity-pulped explorers as far as the Sahara.
Nemo is the obvious center of the book, and his transition from idealistic youngster to bitter man of the world is neatly done. His final conversion to yet another philosophical stance is believable as well. And his on-again, off-again love affair with Caroline (herself a well-rendered woman) is romantically sound. Of course, Verne's own story comes second in importance. Here, Anderson must hew to a generally well-known history, but he makes it fresh, allowing us to experience Verne's strengths and weaknesses intimately. And in Part IX, when Verne's publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, helps Verne conceive of the creation we know as modern science fiction, the reader indeed feels privileged to be present at such a pivotal moment in literature.
Verne has been so consistently and badly mistranslated into English that I find it hard to say whether Anderson successfully replicates Verne's style. But it cannot be denied that he delivers a book that flows swiftly and excitingly, with many dramatic set pieces equal to his model.
