I like this illustration of a scene in Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) even more because it has at least one mistake in it. At least, I think it’s a mistake: the jellyfish on the upper left are two Portuguese men-o’-war (really colonial hydrozoans, not jellyfish). They have gas-filled float-bladders, so in reality you see them only on the surface, not hanging in midwater like that. The mistake makes the scene like a dream. The absence of colour is good too: it fixes the illustration firmly in the past and the colours you imagine are more vivid. The artist is imagining, dreaming, conjuring a vision of an oneiric ocean.
Oneiric Ocean
by Krilling for Company in Art, Marine Biology, The Sea and tagged 1870, 20000 Leagues under the Sea, Captain Nemo, French literature, hydrozoid, jellyfish, Jules Vernes, marine biology, nineteenth-century French literature, Portuguese man-o'-war, science fiction, sea-life, submarines, the sea, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, underwater images, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
Science mistakes can make for vivid images. There’s a good moment in Terry Pratchett’s book Going Postal, where he writes about how sinking ships reach a point where the water is dense enough to support their weight (and they begin an endless voyage on a sea beneath the sea.)
This is wrong – water has about the same density everywhere, and sinking ships go straight to the bottom. But I feel strongly that it should be right.
This is wrong – water has about the same density everywhere, and sinking ships go straight to the bottom. But I feel strongly that it should be right.
Are you sure it’s a mistake rather than different physics on Discworld? But I don’t like Pratchett. A Guardian-reader.