Memo for Nemo

A cultural history of living in the undersea, both fictional and real, from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo to NASA’s ECC02 project. In Memo for Nemo , William Firebrace investigates human inhabitation of the undersea, both fictional and real. Beginning with Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo—an undersea Renaissance man with a library of 12,000 volumes on his submarine—and proceeding through aquariums, undersea photography, artificial seas on land, nuclear-powered submarines, undersea film epics, giant squid, and NASA satellites, Firebrace examines the undersea as a zone created by exploration and invention. Throughout, the history of undersea life is accompanied by an imagined undersea, envisioned by cultural figures ranging from Verne and Herman Melville to Orson Welles and Jimi Hendrix. Firebrace takes readers though the enormous sequence of rooms (impossible in real life) in Nemo’s submarine, recounts the competition among nineteenth-century cities to build the most spectacular aquatic world, and explains the workings of the bathysphere—an early underwater vessel modeled on a hot-air balloon. He considers the aquarium’s function in films as a sort of viewing lens, describes the chlorine-proof artificial sea life seen by passengers on the submarine ride at Disneyland, and reports that Jacques Cousteau’s famous underwater documentaries were in fact highly staged. The oceans of today are not those imagined by Verne; they are changing from both natural processes and human influence. Memo for Nemo documents the power of the undersea in both art and life. Memo for Nemo' is an account of the human inhabitation of the undersea, in fact and fiction. It takes as its starting point Jules Verne's novel 'Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea', with the 'Nautilus' submarine and its captain Nemo - inventor, explorer, oceanologist, gastronome, musician and terrorist. The undersea is examined as a zone created both by exploration and invention, from the earliest attempts to photograph and descend into the depths with deep-sea devices, through the 1960s experiments and actual inhabitation, such as the US 'Sealab' and Cousteau's 'Conshelf', to contemporary remote surveillance of the rapidly changing oceans. This actual history is paralleled and subverted by a fictitious history of films such as 'The Abyss', 'The Life Aquatic' and other hallucinogenic delights. This book is the second title in a planned trilogy of books each exploring specific coastal and aquatic terrains. The first book was Marseille Mix (2010) and the final part will be Hop Baltic (2015). Memo for Nemo is an account of the human inhabitation of the undersea, in fact and fiction. It takes as its starting point Jules Vernes novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with the Nautilus submarine and its captain Nemo inventor, explorer, oceanologist, gastronome, musician and terrorist. The undersea is examined as a zone created both by exploration and invention, from the earliest attempts to photograph and descend into the depths with deep-sea devices, through the 1960s experiments and actual inhabitation, such as the US Sealab and Cousteaus Conshelf, to contemporary surveillance of the rapidly changing oceans. This history is paralleled and subverted by a fictitious history of films such as The Abyss, The Life Aquatic, Das Boot, Bioshock, Fantastic Voyage and other hallucinogenic delights. "An architectural, social, and cultural history of the undersea, using Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and more especially his charasmatic villain Captain Nemo, as his prompt"-- Provided by publisher.