Take Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Remove all the fish classification. Add pirates and weapons of mass destruction. Divide Captain Nemo among approximately five different characters of slightly lesser caliber. The result is this story. It is one of Jules Verne's lesser known works, but is still a very good book. It is interesting to note that after predicting submarines in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne takes it one step further in this novel, predicting submarine warfare. Then he makes another prediction in an explosive of extraordinary destructiveness, which can easily be taken to be a metaphor for nuclear explosives, if this book wasn't written seventy years before the advent of such devices. This book effectively predicts the cold war. Also, the whole thing with James Bond villains having secret lairs in volcanos. Yeah, that came from this book.