Three prisoners aboard the Nautilus. One wants out from the first day and never stops counting. One is being seduced by the wonder of what he has been shown and has quietly stopped calculating escape. One is the hardest woman either of them has ever encountered, and she has been running from America since the early 1850s for reasons she has not volunteered. Captain Nemo cages them with gravity rather than cruelty. He believes he is offering them something. The novel is not sure he is wrong. A reimagining of Jules Verne's 1870 classic told from the perspective of Ned Land, the harpooner who wants out, with alternating chapters from inside Nemo's past-tense interior, a man always living in what already happened to him.

The Nautilus, the coral cemetery, the giant squid, the warship, the Maelstrom: all present. The species catalogs are gone. In their place: what captivity does to three people who respond to it differently, and what it means to watch a man cage himself more completely than he has caged you. Book One of The Adventures of Captain Nemo. Part of the Victorian Era Series from The Writing King. Literary fiction. Inspired by Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published 1870.