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...even though marine science and geology have passed it by.

Captain Nemo is compelling and mysterious as ever, if the passengers are rather broadly drawn (at least all three of them are distinct) and the crew is more or less faceless. (Aside from Nemo, the crew doesn’t speak to the passengers, so they’re never able to pick up the Nautilus’ private language.)

And Verne has really thought things through. Like, how did Nemo get something of this scale built without someone noticing? He farmed out different parts and systems to different factories scattered across the world. Ocean-based textiles, undersea mines, an isolated source of fuel that no surface-based ship will find.

Even the parts where he made up oceanography out of whole cloth, like the deeper outflow throgh Gibraltar (which as it turns out does exist, but not for the reasons Nemo suggests, which have since been found to be incorrect) or the open sea at the south pole (which doesn’t) – or Atlantis, for that matter, with the Canaries as the remnants of the sunken peaks – have at least some logic beyond the rule of cool.

I read an abridged version years ago, when I was in my early teens, and I’ve been meaning to read the whole thing ever since. I’m glad I finally got around to it! Though I suspect a lot of the abridgment had to do with the frequent (and lengthy) lists of fish.

Now I need to finally read The Mysterious Island…

The emphasis on kindness and charity and human connection makes it timeless, beyond the specifics of poverty in England during the early Industrial Revolution or 19th-century Christmas traditions.

Dickens as narrator is more cheerful in "A Christmas Carol" than he is in heavier works like Great Expectations (though even that has its moments of levity), even when describing Scrooge's cruelty, the Cratchets' poverty, or the black market pawn shop where items stolen from his corpse are sold off. The Cratchets making the most of what little they have is of course part of the point, but there's a sort of perverse he-had-it-coming-to-him glee in the latter scene.

The trickiest part is making Scrooge's conversion believable, and while I think some screen versions fall into because-the-theme-demanded-it territory, the original makes it work. The spirits cover all the bases of persuasion, sometimes hinting, other times bluntly throwing Scrooge's own words or actions back in his face. You see just enough of his youth to believe that he could still have some compassion and capacity for joy somewhere, buried deep down, slumbering where they might be rekindled. And you see hints of it beginning as early as Christmas Past. Even if it takes a bunch of ghosts traumatizing him to do it.

Of course, just about every adaptation I've seen popped up in my head while reading it!

And yet after all this time, it’s still not clear what’s so particularly dead about a doornail.

Cross-posted from my website

It's been ages since I last read the actual story. Figured I'd take a break from Toilers of the Sea for something lighter.

...from the anything-goes era of science fiction. About a third of it is a quasi-military time travel mission to retrieve an alien spaceship that crashed in the distant past, before it decays to ruins. Mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, volcanoes, etc. That part goes by too quickly, because Norton is using it to pivot from time travel to space travel. The rest is an outer space adventure as the team is dragged around the galaxy by the ship's autopilot...in the present day...after the civilization that built it has been dead for millennia.

There's a lot of improvising and jerry-rigging, with a crew stuck in a spaceship without sufficient provisions, not sure how long they'll be up there. At times I was reminded of Apollo 13, which of course hadn't happened yet when Norton was writing this in the late 1950s!

Like book three, it handles Native Americans better than I would expect from its contemporaries. Though I did cringe at the two white guys and modern Apache being spray-tanned to pass as prehistoric Native Americans.

The space voyage drags after a while, though. With the ship being on autopilot, it feels like the characters are just along for the ride. They can't even explore too far when the ship stops along its route, because they can't be 100% certain when it will lift off again.

Cross-posted from my website.

Fred Fordham's watercolor-style art is absolutely gorgeous. The adaptation plays to the medium's strengths, allowing the visuals to tell the story when possible, keeping Ursula K. Le Guin's prose when needed. Wide seascapes, rocky coasts, forested landscapes, people (not whitewashed! and dragons...

Cross-posted from my website