Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

In 1866, ship captains on several oceans start reporting the same scare: something enormous, fast, and glowing slams into the hulls of their boats and vanishes into the water. The press of the day picks up the rumor and spreads it fast, the way a viral video today runs through the neighborhood group chat before anyone checks whether it's true.

The most accepted theory is a giant cetacean, a kind of whale never cataloged, strong enough to puncture a ship's plating. Governments and shipping companies are pressured to act, because no vessel wants to risk the route without knowing whether it will come back in one piece.

In this climate of collective panic, the United States outfits a warship, the frigate Abraham Lincoln, with a single mission: hunt the monster and end the mystery.

The French professor Pierre Aronnax is the narrator of the story: a marine biologist and author of books about the depths of the ocean, curious enough to say yes to any strange voyage. He is in New York when he gets the invitation to board the Abraham Lincoln, and he accepts on the spot, more out of scientific fascination than courage.

He brings along Conseil, his personal servant, an organized and loyal fellow who classifies everything in zoological order, even danger itself. On board, the two meet Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner hired to be the best whale hunter available on the continent.

Ned is Aronnax's opposite: practical, distrustful of science, trusting only his own harpoon. This mix, the scientist who wants to understand and the hunter who wants to solve things, repeats itself throughout the whole book.

After months crossing the Pacific with no sign of the monster, the crew was almost ready to give up when the creature finally appears: a strong light under the water, too fast to be an animal. The frigate charges at it, and in the middle of the maneuver comes the collision nobody expected.

The supposed monster neither sinks nor bleeds: it withstands the impact as if it were made of metal, because that is exactly what it is. In the chaos of the crash, Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned Land fall into the sea and find themselves floating on a smooth, hard hull, too far from the ship to swim back.

That was when the trio realized the truth: the sea monster of the press was, in reality, a machine built by man, a submarine decades ahead of anything that really existed in 1866.