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selfwinding 's review for:
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne
The thing I love the most about reading Victorian novels is dissecting the things they were playing with and figuring out about the novel form, and then thinking about how these books would be totally unpublishable now. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea fits both of these categories, especially when considering how many pages are dedicated to scientific classification. In a modern novel we would applaud every moment when the narrator views the world through that classification lens, but we would heavily edit down the breadth and frequency and exhaustion of classifications that happen over and over and over. But Verne got away with it because novels were still new!
Honestly, of all the Victorian sci-fi I've read, I had the most difficulty with this one. When Verne pushed away from the classifications and got into the action and exploration, it was vivid and exciting, but so much of the narrative is concerned with biological classification that I felt a little awash.
Honestly, of all the Victorian sci-fi I've read, I had the most difficulty with this one. When Verne pushed away from the classifications and got into the action and exploration, it was vivid and exciting, but so much of the narrative is concerned with biological classification that I felt a little awash.