Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea even for 1869 ... In none of these technical situation did Verne take advantage of knowledge readily available to him at the time". Thomas said, however, that despite poor science, plot, and characterization, "Put them all together with the magic of Verne's story-telling ability, and something flames up. A story emerges that sweeps incredulity before it". Jules Verne's wrote a sequel to this book: "L'Île mystérieuse" ("The Mysterious Island", 1874), which concludes the stories begun by "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and "In Search of the Castaways". While "The Mysterious Island" seems to give more information about Nemo (or
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea the book from the initial concept is a portrait of Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish national hero, leader of the uprising against Russia in 1794, with an inscription in Latin: "Finis Poloniae!" ("The end of Poland!"). Margaret Drabble argues that "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" anticipated the ecology movement and shaped the French avant-garde. Theodore L. Thomas in 1961 said that "there is not a single bit of valid speculation" in the novel and that "none of its predictions has come true". He described the depictions of the diving gear, scenes, and the "Nautilus" as "pretty bad, behind the times