I thought I was getting a fun underwater pulpy adventure, not pages and pages of autistic fish descriptions

In the 19th century there were real adventuring societies (She by Rider-Haggard is a true story) but they would vet would-be adventurers by slowly inducting them into concentric circles of initiation, and the final circle of initiation was autistic fish descriptions (or rock descriptions if you wanted to be a mountaineer, usw.) and if you balked you were deemed unworthy and banished and never got to go on a real adventure. It's a lot like "Glimpses of Truth" by the Gurdjieff initiate except instead of noetic visions of Pythagorean harmonics they show you fish bone morphology and subtly hint at a Goethean "Urknochen," and if you sigh loudly and go "Who gives a shit about BONES?" they look at each other knowingly and your name is stricken off in the book.

>>24571915 (OP)
There's also the part where they see dead Indians floating in the water through a porthole

>>24571915 (OP)
I read this in middle school and thought it was banal.

>>24571926
Lmao
>>24571941
I didnt like this and I didnt like the time machine

>>24571926

>>24571915 (OP)
>pages and pages of autistic fish descriptions

You make the book sound less autistic than it actually is. Sure, JV doesn't skimp the fish descriptions. But where his autism really comes out to play is in the NUMBERS.

For Jules Verne, a thrilling adventure story is just a receptacle to be crammed full of all those numbers he loves so much. This many tons of steel, that many inches of glass, this many books, that many paintings, this many foot-pounds of torque x this depth x this many weeks, divided by the G.D.P. of France . . .

Remember the bit about the pressure hull? C'est magnifique, mais c'est ne pas le narrative. Quite right too. Science is either quantitative or it's fairy-stories for women and children.

>>24571961
>I didnt like the time machine
So what do you read now, gay porn?