I’m reading Jules Verne these days, to try to learn to read a little French, if not speak it.  So when I sat on a panel on Steampunk at FanX with Kevin J. Anderson, and we talked about Jules Verne and his Voyages Extraordinaires, and then I learned that Kevin has written an alt-take on Verne and one of his most famous characters, I had to buy the book.

And man, am I glad I did.  Captain Nemo is a mashup not only of Verne and his fictional submariner, but of Verne and all his most famous characters.  The basic conceit is that Verne is a hack with no imagination, and in order to have the literary career he wants, he pilfers liberally from the life and real adventures of his boyhood friend, Andre Nemo, who lives through scientific exploration, pirates, desert isles, captivity by Turks, journeys under the sea and to the center of the earth, and so on and so on.

This doesn’t mean that you already know the plot of Captain Nemo.  If you’ve read Verne, what Captain Nemo will give you is a long and delightful cascade of Easter eggs, a respinning and repackaging of tale after tale that never ceases to enthrall.

Amazon doesn’t seem to have the paperback available, but here’s the link to the ebook.

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