Whirlpool such violent tidal surges: Three of the most notable literary references to the Lofoten Maelstrom date from the nineteenth century. The first is the Edgar Allan Poe short story "A Descent into the Maelström" (1841). The second is "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1870), the famous novel by Jules Verne. At the end of this novel, Captain Nemo seems to commit suicide, sending his "Nautilus" submarine into the Maelstrom (although in Verne's sequel Nemo and the Nautilus were seen to have survived). The "Norway maelstrom" is also mentioned in Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick". In the 'Life of St Columba', the author,
Jules Verne Claudel, Jean Cocteau, François Mauriac, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Julio Cortázar, Antoine Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Wernher von Braun, and Jack Parsons. He is credited with helping inspire the "steampunk" genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology. Ray Bradbury summed up Verne's influence on literature and science the world over by saying: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." Jules Verne Jules