Adam Roberts revisits Jules Verne's classic novel in a
collaboration with the illustrator behind a recent highly
acclaimed edition of The Hunting of the Snark
It is 1958 and France's first nuclear submarine, Plongeur,
leaves port for the first of its sea trials. On board,
gathered together for the first time, are one of the Navy's
most experienced captains and a tiny skeleton crew of
sailors, engineers, and scientists. The Plongeur makes her
first dive and goes down, and down and down. Out of control,
the submarine plummets to a depth where the pressure will
crush her hull, killing everyone on board, and beyond. The
pressure builds, the hull protests, the crew prepare for
death, the boat reaches the bottom of the sea and finds
nothing. Her final dive continues, the pressure begins to
relent, but the depth guage is useless. They have gone miles
down. Hundreds of miles, thousands, and so it goes on.
Onboard the crew succumb to madness, betrayal, religious
mania, and murder. Has the Plongeur left the limits of our
world and gone elsewhere?
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