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
