''The Great Eastern'' by Howard A. Rodman is an anticolonial adventure novel, set in the 1850s-1870s in New York, London, India, Paris and the North Atlantic. Pitted against each other are two great 19th-century fictional anti-heroes,

Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne (;''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary''. ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the ''Voyages extraor ...

Captain Nemo Captain Nemo (; later identified as an Indian, Prince Dakkar) is a fictional character created by the French novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905). Nemo appears in two of Verne's science-fiction classics, ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas'' ( ...

and Herman Melville's Captain Ahab. One lives beneath the waves and hates everything upon them. The other lives upon the waves and hates everything beneath. Caught in between is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the preeminent civil engineer of Victorian England, kidnapped and pressed into service to build Nemo his submarine, then to join him in his battle against the modern world. It was published by Melville House Publishing on June 4, 2019. The '' Los Angeles Review of Books'' praised the work, calling it "a

pastiche A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche pays homage to the work it imitates, rather than mocking it ...

in the best postmodern sense: it’s intense, invigorating, and faithful to the originals while still breaking new ground." Leonard Maltin, film critic and Rodman "colleague ... at the USC School of Cinematic Arts," praised the book, calling it a "glorious and expansive new novel." In March of 2019, the film rights to the book were acquired by the UK film company Great Point Media, and Rodman was commissioned to write the screen adaptation.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Great Eastern, The 2019 American novels American adventure novels Works based on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Works based on Moby-Dick Melville House Publishing books