Verne Built a Shared Universe and Broke His Own Timeline

Most readers meet Captain Nemo once, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and assume that is the whole of him. It is not even his ending.

Three books are involved and they were written out of order relative to the story they tell.

What are the three connected Verne novels?

In Search of the Castaways, 1867 to 1868. A search for a shipwrecked captain across the southern hemisphere. Along the way the searchers deal with a mutinous quartermaster named Tom Ayrton, who has betrayed them. Instead of executing him they maroon him on Tabor Island, a speck in the Pacific, with the promise that someone will come back for him one day.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870. Three men are taken aboard the Nautilus and spend a year as guests and prisoners of a captain who will not explain himself. The book ends in a maelstrom off Norway with the fate of the submarine unresolved.

The Mysterious Island, 1875. Five escapees from the American Civil War land by balloon on an uncharted Pacific island. Improbable things keep happening in their favour. They eventually find Ayrton, who has been alone for twelve years and has lost the power of speech. And at the end they find Nemo, dying, aboard the Nautilus in a cavern beneath the island, and he explains himself at last.

So the third book resolves both of the earlier ones, and it resolves them in a way that reframes what those books meant.

Who was Tom Ayrton?

He is the most interesting figure in the three books and the one nobody remembers.

In the first novel he is a villain. He conspired to seize a ship, he lies repeatedly, and when he is caught he negotiates his own life. The marooning is a mercy given to a man who has not earned it, and it is offered with a condition: he will have years alone to become someone else.

When he reappears eight years later in publication terms and twelve years later in story terms, the punishment has done something the book does not romanticise. He is not a reformed man in a clean sense. He is barely a man. He has stopped speaking, moves like an animal, and has to be reintroduced to language and to himself.

Verne is doing something unusual there. The moral arithmetic of the first book, where solitude is offered as a chance at redemption, is tested in the third book and the answer comes back complicated. Something was salvaged. A great deal was destroyed getting there.

Does the Verne timeline hold together?

No, and the contradictions are worse than a casual reader would guess. Most editions carry a footnote quietly admitting it.

In Search of the Castaways is set in 1864 and 1865, and Ayrton is abandoned in March 1865. Twenty Thousand Leagues begins in 1866 and runs to June 1868, when Aronnax and the others leave the Nautilus. The Mysterious Island runs from 1865 to 1869.

Two things then break.

The castaways find Ayrton in December 1866, and he tells them he was marooned twelve years earlier, in March 1855. The first novel put it in March 1865. Verne moved the date by a decade, because two years alone does not produce a man who has lost the power of speech and twelve years does.

And Nemo, dying beneath the island in 1869, says sixteen years have passed since his guests left him, which puts their departure around 1853. Aronnax left in June 1868, one year earlier. So a man who was vigorous and commanding a full crew in 1868 is an aged and solitary survivor a year later, and the maths of his own account puts the visit fifteen years before it happened.

Verne knew. He was writing across a decade for serial publication with a publisher who had opinions, and he needed an old Nemo and a feral Ayrton more than he needed the arithmetic. He also could not move The Mysterious Island later, because he wanted his castaways escaping a Civil War siege, which fixed the start at 1865.

There is a second and more famous piece of interference. Verne first conceived Nemo as a Polish aristocrat exiled after a rising against Tsarist Russia. That was blocked before publication over the diplomatic and commercial consequences, and the nationality was left blank in 1870. By 1875 Nemo is Prince Dakkar, son of a rajah of Bundelkhand, who took part in the 1857 rebellion against the British, and that revision is what makes his hatred of empire specific instead of atmospheric. Hetzel also thought the ending too bleak and had Verne add the Iowa colony.

Why retell it from a minor character?

My honest position on Verne is that he wrote political manifestos and wrapped a plot around them. There is an argument each book wants to make, and the story exists to carry that argument from one end of the volume to the other. The cost lands on the characters, who are paper thin and exist to hold positions and ask the questions that let somebody else answer.

I could not finish Twenty Thousand Leagues for years and only got to the end of the original recently, because it is kind of boring. The premise was never the problem. Three people pulled from the sea and held aboard a vessel that officially does not exist, by a man who will not explain himself, is a good situation and still is. What the book does with it is the problem.

So the situation stayed and the vantage point moved.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea hands the narration to Ned Land, who does not believe in sea monsters, wants off the ship from the first hour, and counts hatches, days, and exits. Aronnax is besotted with the technology and functionally a willing guest. Ned never stops knowing he is a prisoner, and that single change produces a different book from the same year aboard the same vessel.

The Mysterious Island is Gideon Spilett’s private record. A correspondent of twenty years keeps two sets of notes, always, because there is a difference between what a reporter files and what he keeps. Once you accept that, a Verne novel narrated from outside stops being the story and becomes the published version of the story. What Spilett left out of the published account was the whole of Neb, because a close and equal relationship between a white engineer and a Black man was not printable in 1868.

Eurydice is Ayrton’s, and it is the largest gap Verne left. He introduces Ayrton in chapter thirty-one, gives him about thirty pages, and never once goes inside him. Twelve years alone, marooned as punishment, rescued and reformed and killed off, all as machinery for somebody else’s adventure. First a villain, then a reformed villain, then a heroic death.

Verne also never says what Ayrton did. The vagueness suits an adventure novel for boys and lets a young reader move past the ugly part, and it costs the man himself, because a character without specific crimes is not a man but a category. So I gave Ayrton his crimes. What he did between his wife’s death and his marooning is not pleasant. The book runs as a prequel and then straight through The Mysterious Island, so the same events arrive from two directions.

What does a retelling of a classic have to respect?

The events, and almost nothing else.

A retelling that changes what happened is a different book wearing a borrowed title. The Nautilus does what it did. The island does what it did. Ayrton is marooned and is found. Nemo dies where Verne put him.

What is open is interpretation, and it is wide open, because Verne’s narrators are unreliable in a way he did not intend. Aronnax is besotted with the technology and consistently rationalises his captor. He is not a neutral reporter, he is a man in the grip of the most interesting thing that has ever happened to him. Every scene in that book can be read a second way by someone standing next to him with different priorities.

The other obligation is period voice. A Victorian narrator has Victorian assumptions, including ones a modern reader will dislike, and sanding those off produces a character who could not have existed and who cannot make the book’s argument. Verne’s own politics were more complicated than his reputation, and the Nemo revision is the evidence.

What Verne built without a name for it

Set aside the submarine and the balloon, which are what he is remembered for, and the structural achievement is more interesting.

Three novels, published across eight years, that share characters, honour their own consequences, resolve each other’s loose ends, and revise an earlier book’s meaning without contradicting its text. A minor villain from book one becomes a major figure in book three. A protagonist’s mysterious ending in book two is answered in book three by someone else entirely.

That is a shared universe, and it was assembled by one man in the 1860s and 70s for a serial readership, without a template to work from.

It also came with the standard costs, which is oddly reassuring. The timeline does not survive scrutiny. A character’s nationality changed between books for commercial reasons. The author was making it work as he went.

Every long series since has made the same trades, and most of them pretend otherwise.

Why these three books survive

Not the technology, which is why people usually say they survive.

The Nautilus is a magnificent machine and it is not what keeps the book alive. What keeps it alive is a man who has renounced the entire surface world, will not say why for four hundred pages, and is holding three people captive out of a logic he considers self-evident. That is a character problem and it does not date.

Ayrton is the same. A man given twelve years alone as a mercy, and what solitude did to him, is not a Victorian question.

The machines got built and were outgrown. The people are still working.

The three books are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, and Eurydice: The Confession of Tom Ayrton. More of the research behind the fiction is in the writing hub.

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