Publisher Description
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.”
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Locus magazine
About the Authors
Marilynne Robinson is a recipient of the 2017 Chicago Tribune Literary Award for lifetime achievement. She has received the 2016 Library of Congress Prize of American Fiction and a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” She is the author of 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; and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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.
Adam Roberts is a writer of science fiction novels and stories and serves as professor of nineteenth-century literature in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. His novels Salt, Gradisil, and Yellow Blue Tibia were nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. By Light Alone was shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA Award.
About Christian Coulson
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.