Memo for Nemo

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).