Who is Captain Nemo? (No, not the cartoon fish.)

If you’re not familiar with the original Captain Nemo, he’s a character created by the French author Jules Verne in the nineteenth century. Verne wrote about him in two novels, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875), in which Nemo commands the world’s most advanced submarine, the Nautilus.

Captain Nemo was smart, well-educated, courteous, and massively wealthy. He was also angry, bitter, and dangerous. Imagine a combination of Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, and Lex Luthor. Formerly known as Prince Dakkar, Nemo had fought the British colonial government in India. In retaliation, the British killed his wife and children. This was Dakkar’s supervillain/superhero origin story. He renamed himself Nemo, which is Latin for no one. (Greek myth fans: This was an Easter egg about/shout-out to Odysseus, who told the Cyclops Polyphemus that his name was Nobody.) Nemo dedicated the rest of his life to terrorizing the colonial European powers on the high seas, sinking and plundering their ships and making them fear the unstoppable “sea monster” that was the Nautilus.

Who wouldn’t want to have that kind of power? As a kid, every time I jumped in a lake or even a swimming pool, I liked to pretend I was Captain Nemo. I could sink enemy ships with impunity, go all over the world undetected, explore depths no one had ever visited, and uncover fabulous ruins and priceless treasures. I could submerge into my own secret realm and never return to the surface world (which was kind of horrible anyway). When I eventually wrote about Percy Jackson, the son of Poseidon, you can bet that my old daydreams about Captain Nemo and the Nautilus were a big reason I chose to make Percy a demigod of the sea.

Now, I’ll be honest, I found Verne’s novels slow going when I was a kid. But I did enjoy my uncle’s old Classics Illustrated editions, and I loved watching the Disney film version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—even the cheesy bits like Kirk Douglas dancing and singing, and the giant rubber squid attacking the ship. Only when I was older did I realize how rich and complex the original stories were. Nemo was even more interesting than I had imagined. And I began to see little openings in the narrative where Verne had left room for a possible sequel….

Why does Captain Nemo still matter?

Verne was one of the first writers of science fiction. Looking back from the twenty-first century, it can be difficult for us to appreciate just how revolutionary his ideas were, but Verne imagined technology that would not exist for hundreds of years to come. A self-powered submarine that could circle the globe continuously and never have to dock for supplies? Impossible! In 1870, submarines were still newfangled inventions—dangerous tin cans that were more likely to blow up and kill everyone on board than to complete a trip around the world. Verne also wrote Around the World in 80 Days at a time when making the trip that quickly was unthinkable, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, a feat that is still far beyond human technology, though someday, who knows?