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.
