A press release from Sophie Calder of Gollancz:

Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea
Adam Roberts
Illustrated by Mahendra Singh
Published by Gollancz on 16 December 2014
Hardback £16.99 / eBook

A unique literary response to Jules Verne’s seminal tale

A wonderful collaboration between multi award-winning author, Adam Roberts, and talented illustrator Mahendra Singh, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea revisits Jules Verne’s classic science-fiction novel.

It is 1958 and France’s first nuclear submarine, Plongeur, leaves port for the first of its sea trials. On board, gathered together for the first time, one of the navy’s most experienced captains and a tiny skeleton crew of sailors, engineers and scientists.

The Plongeur makes her first dive and goes down, and down and down… Out of control, the submarine plummets to a depth where the pressure will crush her hull, killing everyone on board.

The pressure builds, the hull protests, the crew prepare for death, the boat reaches the bottom of the sea and finds… nothing.

They have gone miles down. Hundreds of miles, thousands… On board the crew succumbs to madness, betrayal, religious mania and murder. Has the Plongeur left the limits of our world and gone elsewhere?

Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea contains 33 full page pen and ink illustrations from acclaimed artist Mahendra Singh, who previously illustrated an edition of The Hunting Snark.

Adam Roberts is commonly described as one of the UK’s most important writers of science-fiction. He is the author of numerous novels and literary parodies. He is professor of 19th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, London University and has written a number of critical works on both science-ficiton and 19th-century poetry. He is a contributor to the SF Encyclopedia.