Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

What Hacker News says

1. kombookchaJun 2026
   I recently started reading Anna Karenina, and even for me as an adult, there's a lot of people with a lot of interconnected relationships to keep track of. But I am surprised by how moving I find it - I guess I expected it to be more distant somehow, but the people really spring to life. If I'd read it as a kid, I imagine I would be relating differently to all of these very adult concerns.

   One of the best gifts I ever got was when my dad plopped down a big box full of old classical adventure novels (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, King Solomon's Mines, Captains Courageous, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo type of stuff) and I devoured all of them over the course of the next year or so. I'm sure I would appreciate a lot of different things about them if I read them now, but they certainly held up in terms of being engaging in spite of them all being 100+ years old by the time I got my hands on them.

   I was a precocious reading kid too, and I sometimes wonder how much I understood of all the stuff I read. I feel like I remember it decently enough, but there must have been a lot going over my head.

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2. antegamisouNov 2021
   Yes I was surprised Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas did not make it to this list. But then most people have a very narrow view of what sci-fi is, boiling it down to cyborgs and space.
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3. wrpOct 2024
   Nemo was originally written as a Polish aristocrat. When you consider that, all aspects of his description in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) make sense. By the time Verne wrote The Mysterious Island (1875), his ire had become more directed toward the British rather than the Russian empire, so he changed Nemo to be an Indian prince.
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4. adrian_bOct 2024
   The change about Nemo's origin must have been done before finishing "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas", because already in that there were expressions of his discontent with the British Empire, above any others, I think towards the end of the novel, when he attacked some British war ship (an attack that was used to convince the more reluctant of the prisoners that they must escape from the submarine).

   That novel has been published in episodes scattered over more than a year, so it would not be unusual if towards its end Verne had a different vision of the story line than when he had started writing it, one year before.

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5. ben_wNov 2023
   I’ve listened to From the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and between the lists of things that mean nothing to me[0] and the humans being unrealistic[1], I have to assume something was lost in the translation, because they… are just not any good.

   [0] 10 kinds of seaweed? I think?

   [1] I spent my life betting against you and losing! / I challenge you to a duel! — followed by both parties getting distracted before the duel and be found chasing butterflies. Was this a secret code for them pretending to hate each other so they could have a gay affair back when such things were forbidden? Because that would make a lot more sense than the actual words in the audiobook.

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6. kaliszadSep 2020
   My father has an idea to use sodium (Na) as fuel for fuel cells. This could easily replace batteries by having more or less instant reactions to demand, being much more energy dense and being simple to handle. Also, there is no CO_2 that would need to be captured compared to "bio" fuels. The resulting sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and hydrogen (H_2) can easily be used further e.g. in the chemical industry or recycled, electrolysis of NaOH is well known and also produces hydrogen as a byproduct. The resulting sodium metal can again be used as fuel. It creates a circular economy. Handling sodium securely at scale is also probably even easier than handling gasoline or diesel. Most of these reactions at industrial scale are more than 50 years old but nobody bothered to actually implement it (even though a hint about sodium cells for electricity generation is present in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater" by Jules Verne already) instead of the more complex approaches like e.g. synthetic gasoline.

   You can look at the orgpage about these ideas https://orgpad.com/s/energiewende my father also gave a talk last week about it, there is a recording, which will be posted during the next days.

   Disclaimer: I work for the small startup OrgPad, which tries to create a tool for easier decomposition of linear ideas/ content into a network of ideas/ content. An ex-Googler, Pavel Klavík PhD. describes the technology (hint Clojure and ClojureScript) and approaches behind OrgPad in a recent talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoIfeb31UU

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