Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea..., Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea..., Jules Verne
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Author: Jules Verne

Narrator: AI Voice Charles Owen

Unabridged: 15 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/30/2026


Synopsis

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Something is attacking ships in the world's oceans. It is fast, nearly indestructible, and capable of punching holes through iron hulls. The scientific consensus, led by Professor Pierre Aronnax of the Paris Museum of Natural History, is that it must be a creature — a narwhal of extraordinary size, perhaps, something evolved in the ocean's unexplored depths. The consensus is wrong. It is not a creature. It is the Nautilus.

And once Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land find themselves aboard it — guests, prisoners, the distinction is never quite established — they will not be going home until Captain Nemo decides they will.

Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, and it remains the most fully realized of all his creations: a novel in which the scientific imagination and the moral imagination operate at the same pitch of intensity, in which the wonders of the underwater world — the kelp forests, the drowned city of Atlantis glimpsed through a porthole, the South Pole reached by submarine — are inseparable from the question of the man who has made that world his permanent exile. Captain Nemo is one of the great figures of nineteenth-century fiction: a man of extraordinary cultivation and extraordinary fury, who has withdrawn from the human world for reasons the novel circles without fully revealing, and whose inner life remains finally unresolved — as oceanic, as deep, and as dark as the element he inhabits.

Twenty thousand leagues is the distance traveled. It is, to be precise, roughly twice the circumference of the Earth, conducted entirely below the surface, in a vessel that had never existed before Verne imagined it. This edition presents the complete text — restoring the chapters and passages removed by earlier English translations — so that the novel can be read as Verne wrote it, in its full scientific and human complexity.

Inexhaustible, strange, and as deep as it promises.

About Jules Verne

French author Jules Verne was born in the port of Nantes in 1828. He later moved to Paris to study law. At age twenty-eight, he married Honorine de Viane, a young widow with two children. Verne published several plays under the tutelage of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. He made his living as a stockbroker until his first successful series, Voyages Extraordinaire, was published in 1863. Soon Verne's novels became enormously popular around the world. Without a scientific background or experiences as a traveler, Verne spent much of his time doing research for his books. However, when the logic of the story contradicted scientific knowledge, Verne took poetic license with science to serve his fast-paced adventures.

Verne's stories caught the spirit of the nineteenth century and its uncritical enthusiasm about scientific progress and invention. His works were often written in the form of a travel book taking the readers on fantastic voyages. Many of Verne's ideas have been hailed as prophetic, predicting some of the inventions that have changed our world, including the airplane, the submarine, and spacecraft. He published sixty-five novels, some twenty short stories and essays, thirty plays, an opera libretto and two geographical works.

In the first part of his career Verne expressed optimism about progress and Europe's central role in the social and technical development of the world. In Verne's later novels, the author's pessimism is reflected in the doom-laden fin-de-siècle atmosphere. In contrast to the adventurous spirit of his novels, Verne's personal life was relatively uneventful, with the exception of his surviving a murder attempt by his insane nephew. Verne died of natural causes in Amiens on March 24, 1905.


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