The architecture holds. The population was wrong.
The method is the same every time. Reread a Victorian adventure novel as an adult, admire the plotting, then notice who’s standing on every page without being given a sentence that matters.
Neb was in Verne’s Mysterious Island the whole time and never got to think about any of it. Ned Land counted days for a year and Verne handed the narration to the professor. Tom Ayrton got thirty pages and a heroic death. Wells wrote a class allegory and gave the Time Traveler nobody to talk to.
Four books, all self-contained. Read the originals first if you like. The bones are the same and the houses are different.
The books
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Told by the harpooner who counted the days
Three prisoners aboard a ship that doesn’t exist, and one of them is counting
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The Mysterious Island
The private record of Gideon Spilett, correspondent
The published account is the one everybody read. This is the other set of notes.
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Eurydice
The Confession of Tom Ayrton
Twelve years alone on a rock, and thirty pages in the book that put him there
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The Time Machine
Thirty stops, five hundred million years, and a machine that learns to talk
He didn’t build it out of curiosity. He built it because his wife was dying and the cure had to be somewhere ahead
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← All series
