|
-
News
- Features
- Events
Calendar
- Editorials
- Monthly
Zine
- Offworld
Report
- Our Daily
RSS Feed
- Movie/TV
Reviews
> Recent movies
> Movies by year
> Movies by title
- Book
Reviews
> Recent books
> Books by year
> Books by title
- Home
- Worlds
- Biography
- Bibliography
- Appearances
- Reviews
- Blog
- Community
- Press
- Links
Become
an Advertiser
- Web
Site Directory
- Search
the Net
- StephenHunt.net
- WoodenRocket.com
- Check
your E-mail
- Non Sci-Fi
News
|
Modest revision
01/05/2008 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Mark R. Leeper is getting up a petition to rearrange the titles of Jules Verne's best-known (in other words filmed) novels. Now what do he mean by that? Buy 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA in the USA - or Buy 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA in the UK  20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA has been a problem for people for a long time. The title is the crux. First of all nobody is quite sure any more what a league is. Originally it was supposed to be [Note: little-known piece of erudition coming up] the distance a horse could travel in an hour. Depending on where you are that could be a different distance. In America we drive our horses harder so an American league is about 3.5 miles. In France they have formalized it.
Their national league is closer to 2.5 miles (or 4 kilometers). This is the kind of horses they have in France and may be one reason that nobody brags that their horse's lineage is French. 20,000 leagues is about 50,000 miles. First of all, the people who thought that Verne was talking about depth are right out. You can't go 20,000 leagues deep on this planet without popping out the other side and still going some distance. Horse distance is measured in horizontal units since right after the time of Pegasus. Verne meant horizontal distance. It is two different thoughts. The characters go a horizontal distance of 50,000 miles and during that time they are under the sea. They are not 20,000 leagues deep.
But here we run into problems again. In the whole course of the novel the characters are never UNDER the sea. They are frequently IN the sea. If you submerge yourself in a swimming pool is it more accurate to say you are under the swimming pool or in the swimming pool? Right. You are in the pool. You could only be under the swimming pool if there were some sort of tunnel system underground beneath the swimming pool. At no point are Captain Nemo, his submarine, or his involuntary guests actually under the sea. To be difficult one could argue that the sea is water and they are under water. But then they are not under the sea; they are under only part of the sea.
They are under the part of the sea that is over them. By the same token they are over the part of the sea that is under them. There is also part of the sea that is neither over nor under them and this part of the sea they are beside. It, in fact, seems unlikely that they are ever under even most of the sea. I doubt that the Nautilus could go very deep considering what we know to be the depth of the ocean and it was supposed to be a very early submarine. Most of the sea would be under them rather than it being them who are under it. And of course there remains the problem that a horse does not travel very far in an hour in the sea even if it is a seahorse.
Now we could correct the title of the book to be 20,000 LEAGUES IN THE SEA, but it might make more sense to give another Verne novel this title. The obvious one is one in which people actually are under the sea. The proper choice would be the book we now erroneously call JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. This book is also arguably misnamed. It is not at all clear to me that the adventurers here ever reach the geometric center of the earth. Nor is it even well-defined what that center is.
Is it the geometric center by distance or is it the center of momentum for the mass of the planet. It does not matter; the travelers never actually reach either point. So to call the novel JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH is a fraud and a sham. Because most of the most avid readers are teenagers this makes it doubly bad. Have you seen their hurt little faces when they realize the title of the book has sold them a bill of goods? It becomes one more fraud that the older generation has foisted upon them.
The one defense I can see is if you think the center the way you think of the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. A Tootsie Roll Pop is a sucker with a center that is of the same primordial material that originally formed the first Tootsie Roll. If one was very tiny or one had a very giant version of a Tootsie Roll Pop, one could burrow down to the (Tootsie-Rollish) "center" without ever reaching the (geometric) center or the center (of momentum). Actually at the true center there is not even Tootsie Roll but a stick of rolled paper waiting to disintegrate on the eater's tongue and to leave bits of paper in the mouth after the pop has been consumed. But this interpretation of center is still misleading if not an out and out cheat. No, the only honest thing to do would be to award the title of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA to the novel that is now called JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH.
Now before someone complains about this proposal let me be perfectly honest with my readers and take my lumps. No, I don't know that the travelers in 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (the novel formerly known as JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH) actually travel 20,000 leagues, but we never do get an accounting of how far they travel so it could have been.
We would not know how far the travelers travel in the novel formerly known as 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA if the distance did not appear in the (former) title. There is also the question of what part of the trip was actually under the sea versus what part of the trip was under dry land. I would say that for the whole trip the explorers arguably are under the sea in that the sea is on a level over their heads. One can say something is under the sun without the sun being directly overhead. So in 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (the novel formerly known as JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH) we can say that the travelers are at a lower level than that of the sea so the title is now arguably accurate.
So while it obviously makes sense to rename JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH to be 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA that leaves the submarine story (once called 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA) without a title. Well, the novel obviously needs a title. As of this writing I am giving serious consideration to calling it FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
Mark R. Leeper
(c) Mark R. Leeper 2008
|
|
