Post by olegrand on Sept 8, 2011 20:43:33 GMT
We all know Captain Nemo – the central character of two of Jules Verne’s most famous novels, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. A few years ago, Alan Moore made him a member of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the actors who portrayed him on the screen include James Mason and Michael Caine.
But WHO was Captain Nemo? Or, more correctly, WHAT was he? A scientific genius gone rogue? A doomed Indian prince? A twentieth-century buccaneer? The mystery of that man’s true identity has fascinated generations of readers – along with some very peculiar discrepancies in the apparent chronology of his life (more on this later).
In his daring essay A Submersible Subterfuge, H.W. Starr tried to prove that Nemo was none other than Professor Moriarty himself; not to be outdone, Jean-Marc Lofficier, the connoisseur extraordinaire of French retro fiction, managed to prove in a chapter of his book Shadowmen that Nemo was in fact Robur the Conqueror (another of Verne’s scientifically advanced mystery men) as well as Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (along with a few others).
Of course, in the world of Doctor Who, everybody knows that none of this really matters, because Captain Nemo was just a fictional character… and everybody’s wrong.
The time has now come to reveal the truth: Captain Nemo was a Time Lord, the Nautilus was his TARDIS and the « ocean » he travelled was actually the sea of time – the Vortex.
Captain Nemo’s name is not his real name – it translates as “Captain Nobody”, a nom-de-guerre forged in exactly the same way as, say, “Doctor Who”… and no, I’m not implying that Nemo was actually the Doctor, since none of the Doctor’s incarnations seem to match the Captain’s appearance and personality (unlike, say, that other – and far more obscure – French fiction hero from the early XXth century named… Doctor Omega (see the link at the end of the post).
We’ll come back later to the tricky question of Nemo’s true identity – but first, let us examine some basic facts about the Captain.
Captain Nemo appears in two of Jules Verne’s novels – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and its sequel The Mysterious Island but his appearance and behavior are VERY different in the two novels, as if we were dealing with two different incarnations of the same individual… as if the Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues had regenerated after his purported death at the end of the novel (and how did he die ? His ship disappeared into the vort… sorry, into the maelstrom). But wait, the best is yet to come! There is also a major time discrepancy regarding Nemo’s timeline between the two novels – a problem which has puzzled and irritated generations of readers - see here for more details. Because of this discrepancy, the chronology of Nemo’s life makes no sense… UNLESS we are dealing with somebody who can travel in time (and thus has a convoluted, non-chronological timeline).
So where does Jules Verne fit into all this?
Back in the 1850s when he was still a would-be author in his early thirties (and hasn’t written any of his famous “Voyages Extraordinaires” novels), Jules Verne became Nemo’s companion, adventuring aboard the Nautilus / TARDIS through space and time just like Rose Tyler and countless other companions did with the Doctor. But after many daring adventures and extraordinary voyages, Nemo eventually decided to get Jules back to his normal life, fate and place in the continuum – perhaps Jules and him had disagreements or perhaps one got tired of the other’s company. Anyway, to get a long story short, Nemo decided it would be better for Jules to simply forget about his fantastic adventures in space and time – which is exactly what happened. Perhaps Nemo hypnotized Jules into forgetting this entire chapter of his life or perhaps he used a memory-altering gadget or a Retcon-style drug. Whatever the method was, it didn’t work perfectly: a few months after Jules’ return to normal life, various fragments of these erased memories began to “bubble up” at the surface of his mind in the form of spontaneous flashes of inspiration and fictional ideas… but because Jules Verne was a rational, practical French man of the nineteenth century, these repressed / half-erased memories were rationalized, reformatted and reinterpreted in terms which his mind could accept and understand: the Vortex was reinterpreted as the ocean (and remember that, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nemo and his Nautilus are supposed to vanish in the Maelstrom!), Nemo’s ship as a submersible and “all the strange, strange creatures” as exotic fishes and giant squids.
The warped and fragmentary memories of Jules’ voyages aboard the TARDIS also provided inspiration for several of his other novels, including The Mysterious Island (with its famous “time discrepancies” which take a whole new meaning here), From the Earth to the Moon, Robur the Conqueror, and its sequel Master of the World… and, of course, Around the World in Eighty Days, whose eccentric (and very Whoesque) hero Phileas Fogg is engaged in a race against Time itself!
So now that we know WHAT Nemo was… a question remains: WHO was he?
Judging from his appearance and behavior, the Master seems a very suitable candidate – in which case the real reasons for erasing the memories of Jules Verne (and for inviting him onboard in the first place) may be tied to some sinister, fiendish master plan - which, perhaps, was foiled by the Doctor. Maybe it was the Doctor, rather than the Master, who obfuscated Jules’ memories to make sure that History would not go awry.
It is also very tempting to follow Jean-Marc Lofficier’s theory and conclude that Robur the Conqueror also was the same Time Lord – after all, “Robur” means “strength” in Latin, a fitting alias for someone like the Master (and don’t forget that the sequel to Robur the Conqueror is called… Master of the World).
That being said, Nemo-Robur could also have been another renegade Time Lord – how about the War Chief? Or that mysterious, recently mentioned “Corsair”? Could this nautically-themed Time Lord have been the Man Known as Nemo in one of his early (male) incarnations?
As for Phileas Fogg, well, as a quintessential British eccentric gentleman of mystery, doesn’t he remind you of a certain Doctor in his Eighth incarnation? To quote Jules Verne’s own words: “People said that he resembled Byron--at least that his head was Byronic.”
Sources & Recommended Reading on this topic:
Philip José Farmer, The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (usually includes the essay A Submersible Subterfuge)
Jean-Marc Lofficier, Shadowmen (also includes stuff on Doctor Omega; here is also the Wikipedia page about this character:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Omega).
Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neil, League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen
And this article by Rik Lai:
www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Articles5.htm#NEMO
But WHO was Captain Nemo? Or, more correctly, WHAT was he? A scientific genius gone rogue? A doomed Indian prince? A twentieth-century buccaneer? The mystery of that man’s true identity has fascinated generations of readers – along with some very peculiar discrepancies in the apparent chronology of his life (more on this later).
In his daring essay A Submersible Subterfuge, H.W. Starr tried to prove that Nemo was none other than Professor Moriarty himself; not to be outdone, Jean-Marc Lofficier, the connoisseur extraordinaire of French retro fiction, managed to prove in a chapter of his book Shadowmen that Nemo was in fact Robur the Conqueror (another of Verne’s scientifically advanced mystery men) as well as Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (along with a few others).
Of course, in the world of Doctor Who, everybody knows that none of this really matters, because Captain Nemo was just a fictional character… and everybody’s wrong.
The time has now come to reveal the truth: Captain Nemo was a Time Lord, the Nautilus was his TARDIS and the « ocean » he travelled was actually the sea of time – the Vortex.
Captain Nemo’s name is not his real name – it translates as “Captain Nobody”, a nom-de-guerre forged in exactly the same way as, say, “Doctor Who”… and no, I’m not implying that Nemo was actually the Doctor, since none of the Doctor’s incarnations seem to match the Captain’s appearance and personality (unlike, say, that other – and far more obscure – French fiction hero from the early XXth century named… Doctor Omega (see the link at the end of the post).
We’ll come back later to the tricky question of Nemo’s true identity – but first, let us examine some basic facts about the Captain.
Captain Nemo appears in two of Jules Verne’s novels – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and its sequel The Mysterious Island but his appearance and behavior are VERY different in the two novels, as if we were dealing with two different incarnations of the same individual… as if the Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues had regenerated after his purported death at the end of the novel (and how did he die ? His ship disappeared into the vort… sorry, into the maelstrom). But wait, the best is yet to come! There is also a major time discrepancy regarding Nemo’s timeline between the two novels – a problem which has puzzled and irritated generations of readers - see here for more details. Because of this discrepancy, the chronology of Nemo’s life makes no sense… UNLESS we are dealing with somebody who can travel in time (and thus has a convoluted, non-chronological timeline).
So where does Jules Verne fit into all this?
Back in the 1850s when he was still a would-be author in his early thirties (and hasn’t written any of his famous “Voyages Extraordinaires” novels), Jules Verne became Nemo’s companion, adventuring aboard the Nautilus / TARDIS through space and time just like Rose Tyler and countless other companions did with the Doctor. But after many daring adventures and extraordinary voyages, Nemo eventually decided to get Jules back to his normal life, fate and place in the continuum – perhaps Jules and him had disagreements or perhaps one got tired of the other’s company. Anyway, to get a long story short, Nemo decided it would be better for Jules to simply forget about his fantastic adventures in space and time – which is exactly what happened. Perhaps Nemo hypnotized Jules into forgetting this entire chapter of his life or perhaps he used a memory-altering gadget or a Retcon-style drug. Whatever the method was, it didn’t work perfectly: a few months after Jules’ return to normal life, various fragments of these erased memories began to “bubble up” at the surface of his mind in the form of spontaneous flashes of inspiration and fictional ideas… but because Jules Verne was a rational, practical French man of the nineteenth century, these repressed / half-erased memories were rationalized, reformatted and reinterpreted in terms which his mind could accept and understand: the Vortex was reinterpreted as the ocean (and remember that, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nemo and his Nautilus are supposed to vanish in the Maelstrom!), Nemo’s ship as a submersible and “all the strange, strange creatures” as exotic fishes and giant squids.
The warped and fragmentary memories of Jules’ voyages aboard the TARDIS also provided inspiration for several of his other novels, including The Mysterious Island (with its famous “time discrepancies” which take a whole new meaning here), From the Earth to the Moon, Robur the Conqueror, and its sequel Master of the World… and, of course, Around the World in Eighty Days, whose eccentric (and very Whoesque) hero Phileas Fogg is engaged in a race against Time itself!
So now that we know WHAT Nemo was… a question remains: WHO was he?
Judging from his appearance and behavior, the Master seems a very suitable candidate – in which case the real reasons for erasing the memories of Jules Verne (and for inviting him onboard in the first place) may be tied to some sinister, fiendish master plan - which, perhaps, was foiled by the Doctor. Maybe it was the Doctor, rather than the Master, who obfuscated Jules’ memories to make sure that History would not go awry.
It is also very tempting to follow Jean-Marc Lofficier’s theory and conclude that Robur the Conqueror also was the same Time Lord – after all, “Robur” means “strength” in Latin, a fitting alias for someone like the Master (and don’t forget that the sequel to Robur the Conqueror is called… Master of the World).
That being said, Nemo-Robur could also have been another renegade Time Lord – how about the War Chief? Or that mysterious, recently mentioned “Corsair”? Could this nautically-themed Time Lord have been the Man Known as Nemo in one of his early (male) incarnations?
As for Phileas Fogg, well, as a quintessential British eccentric gentleman of mystery, doesn’t he remind you of a certain Doctor in his Eighth incarnation? To quote Jules Verne’s own words: “People said that he resembled Byron--at least that his head was Byronic.”
Sources & Recommended Reading on this topic:
Philip José Farmer, The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (usually includes the essay A Submersible Subterfuge)
Jean-Marc Lofficier, Shadowmen (also includes stuff on Doctor Omega; here is also the Wikipedia page about this character:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Omega).
Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neil, League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen
And this article by Rik Lai:
www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Articles5.htm#NEMO
) or the Lotus-Eaters could all be reinterpreted as "adventures in space and time", with every perilous island visited by Odysseus and his... companions representing a different planet or era. 
