Adam Roberts's Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea revisits Jules Verne's classic novel in a collaboration with the illustrator behind a recent highly acclaimed edition of The Hunting of the Snark
It is 1958 and France's first nuclear submarine, Plongeur, leaves port for the first of its sea trials. On board, gathered together for the first time, are one of the Navy's most experienced captains and a tiny skeleton crew of sailors, engineers, and scientists. The Plongeur makes her first dive and goes down, and down and down. Out of control, the submarine plummets to a depth where the pressure will crush her hull, killing everyone on board, and beyond. The pressure builds, the hull protests, the crew prepare for death, the boat reaches the bottom of the sea and finds nothing. Her final dive continues, the pressure begins to relent, but the depth gauge is useless. They have gone miles down. Hundreds of miles, thousands, and so it goes on. Onboard the crew succumb to madness, betrayal, religious mania, and murder. Has the Plongeur left the limits of our world and gone elsewhere?
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“Psychological depth in a picaresque protagonist: most unusual and very welcome…In line with Proustian concerns of memory, Cavala remembers not only himself but much of the central matter of the ‘50s satirical SF of Sheckley, Bester, Pohl, and Kornbluth…Very pleasing.”
— Locus magazine
“A sinuously clever homage to the godfather of the scientific romance.”
— Financial Times“One of the few things you can be certain of when booking up a book by Adam Roberts is that it will be clever, quirky and a little strange. Twenty Trillion Leagues under the Sea doesn’t disappoint in any of the regards.”
— Starburst magazine (UK)“Wears a big grin…packed with sly jokes, puns and farcical moments. Blending the best of modern and older styles his prose is never less than a delight. There’s no one else writing material quite like this. 4 ½ stars.”
— SFX magazine (UK)“Both old-fashioned in its homage to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and modern in its sf aspirations, the latest work from Roberts is…a pleasure to read.”
— Library Journal“Christian Coulson’s measured narration builds the suspense successfully.”
— AudioFileBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Marilynne Robinson is the author of numerous books, including Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack, a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.”
Adam Roberts is a staff correspondent for the Economist. For four years he was the publication’s Johannesburg bureau chief, reporting from Madagascar, Congo, South Africa, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, and—illegally—from Zimbabwe, as well as from many areas in between. He has also reported from Southeast Asia, the Balkans, Europe, and the United States. A former student of international politics at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, he is now based in London.
Christian Coulson is an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator and an actor best known for his role as Tom Marvolo Riddle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Other film credits include Take Me Back, I Am Nasrine, and Amateurs.