The novels are in the same universe as the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea novel
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea features Submarine Pirates whose side arms are air guns firing glass bullets with capacitors that shock the target to death in the 1868, the Sandokan novel The King of the Sea has a Death Ray that blows up warship munition magazines, and both Nemo and Sandokan are madmen fighting The British Empire (the main difference being that Sandokan gets saner during the course of The Tigers of Mompracem and is in full control of his faculties by his reappearance in The Pirates of Malaysia, while Nemo slowly goes madder).- Spanish author Fernando Savater actually conjectures in an essay that Captain Nemo was Sandokan's son, pursuing his father's anti-British rebellion with more advanced technology.
- An interesting theory, that nonetheless runs in the face of two facts: first of all, Sandokan ultimately made peace with The British Empire, as they both knew from experience that Britain could have destroyed Sandokan but would have paid too big of a price; second, Marianna died childless, and while Sandokan may have had children from Lucy Wan Harter (the Dutch woman he met in "The Reconquest of Mompracem" that is later implied to have become his mistress) Nemo would have had to be a son of Marianna to be old enough to fight Britain in 1868.
