Review by C.J. Bunce
Nearly one hundred years after Bushnell’s Turtle (the submersible, not the sandwich shop), Jules Verne introduced the world to his futuristic advanced submarine the Nautilus. In the pages of his novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, an expedition is investigating a giant sea monster that ends up being Captain Nemo’s famous submarine. A predecessor to modern steampunk stories, 20,000 Leagues gets a sequel 145 years later in C. Courtney Joyner’s new steampunk novel Nemo Rising.
Pushing aside Verne’s own sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo Rising finds Captain Nemo a prisoner of the United States, jailed in a vault in Virginia in a form of solitary confinement and set to be hanged for destroying the USS Abraham Lincoln. Partially destroyed but slightly rebuilt and sitting in drydock, the Nautilus would seem to be calling for its captain as a bevy of sea monsters begins to destroy European vessels in the Atlantic. U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant is eager to hang Nemo, but realizes he needs to negotiate a deal for Nemo’s cooperation to prove that these sea monsters are causing the destruction to get the international community off his back. As the President dodges assassination attempts riding his trusty horse Cincinnati, he finally resorts to using a new invention, an airship, to redouble the efforts to see that Nemo completes his mission and learns the truth behind these attacks. Accompanied against his wishes by the airship inventor’s intrepid daughter, Nemo seeks his own form of payback as he takes the choice of the mission over the gallows. The result is a classic seafaring adventure any fan of classic science fiction or pirate tales will love.
With the pacing and action level of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, Nemo Rising reveals a brother-in-arms of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab on the footing of a modern vengeance story as found in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 or Netflix’s The Punisher. This Captain Nemo story is a fun read that will be gobbled up by fans of Verne (especially his novel Master of the World) and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It also reflects the realism of living and working at sea, but without all the precise detail like you’d find in C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, the Patrick O’Brian Jack Aubrey books, or the famous mutiny stories–it’s more like watching their television adaptations.
Consistent with the original novel, Captain Nemo is a champion of the underdog, and here he becomes a champion of all life, whether or not below the sea. The dual stories of President Grant and Captain Nemo are completely engaging–whatever you know of the Civil War hero-turned President, you’ll never think of him the same way again. You could see Alexander Siddig as Nemo and Russell Crowe as Grant in a film adaptation, and in fact, author Joyner began his story as a screenplay. The visual storytelling certainly comes through. The author provides an excerpt of the original script at the end of the novel.
A “living, breathing machine,” the Nautilus as presented here is itself qualified to join our growing list of cyborgs.
One of 2018’s best sci-fi/fantasy reads, grab your copy of C. Courtney Joyner’s Nemo Rising, from Tor Books, available now here at Amazon.
