Professor Aronnax is invited on an expedition to find a giant sea creature responsible for eating a hole in a steel ship and almost sinking it. Having a passion for studying the sea, he gratefully accepts and brings his assistant along with him. On the ship, they meet Canadian harpooner Ned Land who will be responsible for taking the beast down. It takes a while, but they eventually find the monster and pursue it. When they get close enough they try a shot at the beast, it looks like it does no damage. The beast takes aim at the ship and Prof. Aronnax and his mate go overboard.
In the water, far away from the ship, they also find Ned Land clinging to what looks like a piece of the beast. But it's made out of steel, surely it's not an animal. Suddenly a door opens and they are brought within this ship and kept captive. The beast they everyone has been trying to pursue is an advanced submarine.
Being kept captive on the ship, the trio is allowed to partake in the adventures they go on. They see things no one but those on the ship have seen and venture to places no one has been. It's obviously Verne had an incredible imagination to pull this book together and, despite it being 100+ years old, still reads like something that could happen today. This is where the book excels, as the characters are a bit weak. There was no purpose to Aronnax's assistant in the book at all. He provided absolutely not value to drive the plot forward. And even the main characters like Aronnax, Land, and Captain Nemo we don't find out too much about.
Even with this, the book's weakest point is the ending. It's like Verne couldn't figure out how to end the book so just gave up and said oh well we're done now. It's unfortunate as otherwise the book was pretty fun.
First Line: "In the year 1866 the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon."
Rating:
(3/5)
I struggle to find the words to describe this book for me. It centres around two characters: Patricia and Laurence. Patricia is a witch who can cast spells, heal people, fly, and talk with animals. Laurence is a tech geek who can build incredibly complex machines and AI. The two should have absolutely nothing in common but they find each other as outcasts in school. When Laurence learns of Patricia's skills, they drift apart but reconnect as adults. Meanwhile, the world around them is turning to shit and it could be on them to fix it.
When the disease hit, the midwife was right in the thick of it working at the hospital as it took out almost all females and children. No babies survived childbirth and hardly any of the mothers. Men were contracting the disease as well, but the mortality rate wasn't as high as the females. When she falls sick she thinks this is the end for her as well.
Zack Lightman is a video game geek. He's spent countless hours honing his craft and has become one of the top ten ranked players of Armada. Then, one day, he sees one of the enemy's fighter planes outside of his school's window. Zack decides he's losing it, just like his father did before he died.
When an alien spaceship comes in to Earth's orbit and fails to contact, people know this isn't going to end well. The first wave cut the lights, the second destroyed the coasts, the third killed the majority of the population, the fourth made it impossible to trust anyone and the it's just a matter of time before the fifth wave starts. Cassie and her brother survive the fourth wave but get separated from each other and Cassie promises him that she'll find him. Knowing that she's being hunted and not being able to trust anyone, Cassie has to figure out how to find her brother.
Victor Vale is a detective in the future, many years from now where you need only insert a needle into your arm to be connected to the virtual reality internet, art and expression is not allowed, and robots are part of every day life (Vale has a robot housekeeper... Jetsons anyone!?). His boss tasks him with taking down a group of creators, which are artists and not allowed in the world. Using future technology, Vale changes in to his alter-ego as a reporter and visits this forbidden underground world. He quickly realizes that perhaps these creators aren't as bad as society makes them out to be. Don't we all have a bit of creator in us?
In the previous novel, Ender's Game, the buggers are no longer threatening earth and Ender has become the Speaker for the dead for the buggers. As Ender and his sister Valerie travel the worlds, their names live on in infamy. Valerie continues to write, Ender continues to speak. When a speaker is requested on Lusitania when a xenologer is killed by a new race of species, the piggies, Ender knows he must travel to speak the death and find out what the piggies were malicious in their murder or whether it is a misunderstood custom. When Ender arrives, 22 years later, there has been an additional death and Ender knows he must save the piggies before yet another race is destroyed.
It's 2044 and the world is a mess. Oil prices are so high no one can afford to run cars, world politics are in shambles, and all citizens are using an online utopia OASIS like a drug to escape. When the creator of OASIS dies, his will is broadcast to every user and he tells all that there are three keys hidden in the online world that those worthy can find. Once the finder has all three keys and passes three gates, they will receive the creator's inheritance, which is in the multi-billions of dollars. Not surprisingly, many people set off to try and hunt these easter eggs, including one Wade Watts, a teenage boy who lives in the stacks with his aunt. There's also a large corporation hunting the eggs and everyone knows that if they find them, they will take over OASIS and change it forever. This hunt isn't as easy as it seems though, with many different worlds to work through, it's hard to pin point where exactly these eggs could be. Over five years go by until Wade, avatar Parzival, finds one. Then the hunt is really on.
Ender Wiggin is a young boy who is considered to be Earth's hope at defeating the buggers who, years before, had almost destroyed Earth. Children are now to be trained at a young age to determine if they have what it takes to fight the buggers so that once they return to Earth, defeat is guaranteed. The kids are placed in very stressful situations and due to Ender's promise, the teachers alienate him so that he knows he can't depend on friends or teachers to help him out.
Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy go to a special school that's on for kids like them. They live there and learn there and, in many ways, they are like normal teenagers. But some things don't seem to make much sense to those three and as they slowly start to peel away the layers, they learn more about what their future is going to be like. As they learn about their future, they also need to go through regular teenage problems, like betrayal, gossip, and sex.