Captain Nemo: The First Antihero of Science Fiction

Nemo never explains himself, and that refusal is the most modern thing about him. He builds the most advanced machine on Earth, names it after a nautilus, and uses it to disappear entirely from the nations that made him — hoarding a hatred so total that Verne never even lets the reader learn its cause until a much later novel, and even then only partially.

He is not the noble explorer that adaptations have often flattened him into. He’s a self-exiled aristocrat, possibly a dispossessed prince, funding a private war against empire from beneath the sea, and Aronnax — the naturalist who narrates the book — never fully decides whether he is being rescued or held prisoner by a genius he can’t help admiring.

That ambiguity is what separates Verne’s book from a century of adventure fiction it inspired, including the machine itself, which is easier to love without reservation than the man who built it.

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