Jules Verne: Father of Science Fiction? John Derbyshire

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ules Verne (1828-1905) is con- bibliographers under the heading Les ventionally regarded as the Voyages Extraordinaires. These were Jfather of science fiction. Some works of fiction whose plots either literary historians may dispute this, hinged on some extrapolation, or asserting that sci-fi goes all the way untried application, of the science back to the early moderns or even of Verne’s time, or at a minimum the ancients (via, of course, Bacon’s used some unresolved scientific issue “New Atlantis”...), (and here you have with the boldest Books by Jules Verne in the to include geogra- spirits even claim- “Early Classics of Science phy among the sci- ing Homer’s Odyssey Fiction” series from ences) as a “hook” Wesleyan University Press for the genre. That on which to hang an seems to me a stretch. The Mysterious Island adventure story. Since science, as we 2002 ~ 728 pp. A handful of those now understand the $24.95 (paper) books, all from the term, did not really first dozen or so of begin until the sev- The Begum’s Millions those 42 years, are enteenth century, 2005 ~ 308 pp. known, at least by surely science fiction $29.95 (cloth) name, to any person cannot have existed literate in modern any earlier. The Mighty Orinoco Western culture. 2003 ~ 448 pp. Reserving the $29.95 (cloth) $19.95 (paper) Twenty Thousand right to offer some Leagues Under the qualifications of my Invasion of the Sea Sea was made into own, “father of sci- 2001 ~ 288 pp. a fine early special- ence fiction” will do $27.95 (cloth) effects movie by very well as a start- Disney in 1954. Two ing point for discussing Verne and years later, producer Mike Todd made his works. Between 1863 and 1905, Verne’s Around the World in Eighty this very bourgeois French gentle- Days into a cast-of-thousands, cos- man—Verne was the son of a lawyer, tume-and-scenery extravaganza that and his only paid employment outside won five Oscars. My ten-year-old son literature was a brief spell as a stock- owns, and has read, an abbreviated broker—wrote 65 books grouped by young-reader’s edition of Journey to

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Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. JOHN DERBYSHIRE the Center of the Earth, and at least one cially successful but in other respects recent movie, the rather dire 2003 unsatisfactory, and are rather resent- The Core, can claim to be distantly ed by Verne’s more serious admirers. descended (so to speak) from that Because the books were considered book. The names of Verne’s first pub- to be for children, and therefore to lished novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, have no literary importance, trans- and his third, From the Earth to the lators felt free to abridge, amend, Moon (generally issued together with or even rewrite them. Translation its sequel, Around the Moon) ring a work was in any case (and still is) bell with some of us, though I do not badly paid and otherwise unreward- think they are much read nowadays, ing. Furthermore, the metric system except perhaps in abridged children’s Verne used was unfamiliar to his versions. The rest of Verne’s titles are British and American translators, so now little known. that the conscientious calculations he Verne’s biographers generally sometimes included in his text were, acknowledge that the quality of his when not omitted altogether, fre- books fell off after the mid-1870s, quently garbled in English-language and that many of the later ones, editions, leading the more attentive though some contain interesting or reader to think that Verne was care- original notions, are little more than less or innumerate. pot-boilers. At the time of Verne’s With the growth of college English death in 1905, sales of these later departments in recent decades, and books were at unimpressive levels. the acceptance of science fiction as a The Mighty Orinoco, for example, had proper field of study for literary the- a first-print run of only 5,000 at its orists and cultural historians, some publication in 1898, and unsold cop- salvage work has been undertaken. ies remained in the publisher’s stock- This is the context for the publica- room years later. Some of the later tion by Wesleyan University Press novels, including that one, were not of four new English translations of translated into English. The fault Verne novels, with annotations and here does not lie entirely with Verne. introductions by scholars. These The very success of his early works four translations came out between inspired numerous imitators, so that December 2001 and November 2005, by the end of the nineteenth century and apparently they will be followed a reader seeking “scientific romanc- by others. The four originals span es” in the style of Verne had plenty a period from the high summer of of authors to choose from. Verne’s fame and popularity, in the The first English-language trans- mid-1870s, to the very end of his lations of Verne’s work appeared in career in the year of his death, 1905. the early 1870s. They were commer- For that reason it seems to me best

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Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. JULES VERNE: FATHER OF SCIENCE FICTION? to deal with them in the order of the Civil War and a dog belonging original publication, rather than in to one of them. All are trapped by the order of Wesleyan’s translations, various circumstances in Richmond, the dates of which I shall note only Virginia in March 1865. During a in passing. tremendous storm they make their escape from the city in a balloon, he Mysterious Island was pub- which is then swept far across the Tlished in installments through world to the empty wastes of the 1874 and 1875. It can, I think, fairly southwest Pacific. The balloon fails be described as the best-known of at last, and the five are washed up on Verne’s lesser-known works. It was an uncharted island. translated into English twice in the Desert-island stories, or “Robinson- 1870s, and all the other English- ades” as they were known in publish- language editions available prior to ing circles of the time (after Robinson this one from Wesleyan were derived Crusoe, of course, the granddaddy of from the first of those transla- them all), were a staple of nineteenth- tions, usually much abridged. This century popular fiction. Writing of Wesleyan edition of January 2002 is another specimen, Charles Reade’s a completely new and full translation Foul Play, which was published five of the French text, and includes the years before The Mysterious Island, original illustrations (as do the other George Orwell remarked: “Some three books in this series). The trans- desert-island stories, of course, are lator is Sidney Kravitz, billed on the worse than others, but none is alto- book’s cover as a “retired scientist gether bad when it sticks to the actu- and engineer.” The introduction and al concrete details of the struggle endnotes are supplied by literary to keep alive. A list of the objects in scholar William Butcher, who has a shipwrecked man’s possession is also published translations of Verne, probably the surest winner in fiction, though not in the Wesleyan series. surer even than a trial scene.” Verne’s One of the young Jules Verne’s castaways have one of the shortest own favorite books was The Swiss such lists: the clothes they are wear- Family Robinson, a children’s classic ing, a single match, two watches, the from the early nineteenth century, dog’s metal collar, and one grain of in which the energetic and capable wheat. They are Americans, though, family of the title are marooned on and this was the beginning of the a desert island, which they soon era—it ended with the Apollo pro- transform into a little Switzerland. gram—when the U.S.A. was seen by The Mysterious Island builds on the foreigners, certainly by Verne, as the same idea. Verne’s castaways are five can-do nation, populated by ruggedly Americans from the Union side in self-reliant types who could turn

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Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. JOHN DERBYSHIRE their hands to any practical task. able boat—no mere raft, of course, The personification of this national but “a vessel of 250 to 300 tons.” In stereotype is Cyrus Smith, leader of the meantime, we have been taken the castaways, “an engineer and a through subplots about a stranger scientist of the first rank,” and also rescued from a neighboring island, “courage personified,” who “had been a ship full of escaped convicts, and in all the battles of the Civil War.” some inexplicable occurrences, all to Under Smith’s direction, in next to the castaways’ advantage, that sug- no time the castaways have a forge, gest the presence of a hidden bene- a brickworks, a pottery kiln, and a factor watching and helping them. glassworks up and running. When At the end of the book this benefac- they need to remove a rock barrier tor turns out to be none other than to lower the water level of a lake, Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Smith manufactures nitroglycerin. Leagues Under the Sea. Nemo dies; the The various chemical processes are island explodes; the castaways are carefully described. Having installed rescued by a passing vessel out of one themselves in a large cave high on of the subplots, and all ends happily. some cliffs, the castaways construct Of the four books salvaged by an eighty-foot rope ladder whose Wesleyan, The Mysterious Island is “sides, formed of juncus fibers tightly much the best, and may very well— braided by means of a winch, had the not having read all 65 of the “extraor- strength of a thick cable.” This, how- dinary voyages,” I cannot speak ever, is a mere makeshift, for “Cyrus definitively—be the last decent book Smith planned on later installing a Verne wrote. In spite of implausibili- hydraulic elevator”! He actually does ties like those noted above, the author so. The youngest of the castaways, a keeps a good narrative pace going, boy of fifteen, is a walking encyclo- manages his action scenes decently pedia of botany and zoology, so that well, and works up a nice air of our heroes encounter few difficulties mystery about the castaways’ hidden in provisioning themselves, and in benefactor. The translators, it must seeking out construction materials be acknowledged, were right: this is like those juncus fibers. kid fiction, or at best young-adult fic- It is all a bit implausible, and one tion. It has no social dimension. The finds oneself wondering whether characters of the castaways are mere- people in their situation, and of their ly sketched, and they do not interact energy and abilities, would not bend with each other in any interesting their efforts to escaping from the ways. One of them is a freed Negro, island rather than making it a home Cyrus Smith’s manservant; but Verne away from home. It takes them three makes so little of this that I found years to set about constructing a suit- myself forgetting the man’s color for

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Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. JULES VERNE: FATHER OF SCIENCE FICTION? quite long stretches. Even that little northwestern United States, a “City is too much for a modern—I probably of Well Being” built according to the mean “post-modern”—academic, of best principles of public health and course. The book’s annotator warns education, to which are invited to live us sternly that: “What should not be “all honest families whom poverty glossed over is the systematic racism and lack of employment might have of the novel.” driven from overpopulated lands.” Personally I found no difficulty in The horrid German of course builds glossing over it. I could not, in fact, the opposite kind of city, a City of detect it. The story of the princess Steel, thirty miles away, and dedi- and the pea comes to mind. The cates it to the manufacture of new Negro of The Mysterious Island seems and terrible weapons. His main aim to me to be as capable as his com- is to destroy the City of Well Being. rades. He is not even given a comic However, he is foiled by a deus ex dialect to speak, though I suppose machina plot device, and by the efforts this might be discretion on the trans- of a gallant young man who loves lator’s part. In fact, the scraps of the French doctor’s daughter. Good politics in the book—Nemo’s denun- France therefore triumphs over evil ciation of the British Empire, and Germany, redressing, at least in fic- the author’s plain partiality for the tion, the humiliation of the Franco- Union side in the Civil War—are all Prussian War eight years earlier. of a very progressive kind by nine- It is curious to see such a strongly teenth-century standards, and are drawn caricature of the racist, bom- anyway incidental to the story. bastic, obsessive-compulsive, milita- ristic German at such an early date, he same cannot be said of The but the novel is otherwise without TBegum’s Millions, one of two much interest. The love-affair sub- books Verne published in 1879. This plot is dealt with in a very perfunc- is a pretty straightforward anti- tory way, and would have been omit- German diatribe, dressed up as a ted altogether if Pierre-Jules Hetzel, story about a huge inheritance divid- Verne’s publisher, had not insisted ed between an idealistic French phy- otherwise. The story, including this sician and a grotesque German aca- subplot, was actually a reworking demic given to writing articles with by Verne of a manuscript Hetzel titles like, to quote an actual example, had bought from a colorful charac- “Why Are All Frenchmen Stricken in ter named Paschal Grousset, a fugi- Different Degrees with Hereditary tive from justice at the time. This Degeneration?” The French benefi- we learn from the annotator of the ciary uses his portion of the inheri- Wesleyan edition, Peter Schulman of tance to build a model city in the far Old Dominion University in Norfolk,

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Virginia. The translator of this vol- as they please. He actually favored ume is Stanford L. Luce, Professor the anarchist movement that was Emeritus of French at Miami plaguing Europe in his later years— University in Ohio. I have no doubt Prince Kropotkin was one of his that Prof. Luce’s command of French acquaintances. The assassination of is all that it should be for a college the French President by an anarchist teacher of that language, but his in 1894 seems not to have dismayed rendering of some of Verne’s dia- Verne. Yet he was first and foremost logue in English is gratingly anach- a provincial French bourgeois, and ronistic. We should not see locutions in the practical affairs he was obliged like “You’re right up there with the to vote on as a councillor, he favored Rothschilds!” or “Is he ever stupid...” order and convention over liberty in a nineteenth-century novel. and social innovation. As well as echoing the passions aroused by the Franco-Prussian War, hat Verne needed to be persuad- the crudity of the social commen- Ted (or perhaps just told: it seems tary in The Begum’s Millions prob- that in the relationship between Verne ably reflects Verne’s own lack of real and Hetzel, the author proposed, but interest in politics or society. That the publisher disposed) to include comment needs some qualification. some love interest in The Begum’s In his sixties and seventies Verne Millions will not surprise readers of was in fact a working politician, Verne’s better-known works. The though how he found the time while Indian widow rescued by, and even- turning out a book and a half a year tually married to, Phileas Fogg in is baffling to me. From 1888 to 1904 Around the World in Eighty Days is he served as a municipal councillor in the merest of ciphers, and none of the provincial town of Amiens, where the other big Verne classics contain he lived. His service seems to have any women at all that I can recollect. been conscientious and useful—he It would have been easy enough to was elected four times—but it is hard include a woman among the cast- to deduce from it much of a fixed ide- aways in The Mysterious Island. It ology, or even a coherent set of ideas would not even have been original: about politics. Reborn in our own Charles Reade’s hero in Foul Play time, Verne would likely have been is marooned with an heiress, whom a libertarian. He was very strongly he marries at the end of the book. attracted to the idea of natural lib- (Stacpoole’s The Blue Lagoon, which erty, at least for people like himself. took this line of thought as far as That is why his only really compel- it can, or should, be taken, was still ling characters are those like Captain three decades in the future.) It is hard Nemo and Phileas Fogg, who do just to imagine Verne thinking of this,

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Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. JULES VERNE: FATHER OF SCIENCE FICTION? though, and the chances are it never army. It eventually emerges that the occurred to him. So far as one can lad is actually a lass, seeking her lost judge from the biographies, Verne father, whose last known address was had no interest in women at all after on the upper Orinoco. That is the some youthful infatuations, the last entire “feminist” content of the book. of which ended in a marriage that The annotator here is Walter rapidly cooled. Verne’s son Michel James Miller, professor of English was born when the author was 33, at New York University. Prof. Miller and husband and wife took to sepa- takes the “feminist” scraps offered rate beds soon thereafter. They do to him by Jules Verne and pumps not seem to have had much in com- them up to beach-ball size with post- mon. It would not have been too modernist gas, crediting our author transgressive of the French bour- with “remarkable intuition about geois code for Verne to have taken a androgyny.” As a writer, in fact, Prof. mistress, but he never did so, though Miller is more entertaining than the there is some circumstantial evidence late-period Jules Verne, though unin- of an “intellectual friendship” with tentionally so. The Mighty Orinoco is a Parisian lady in the 1880s, dur- a dreary book, a thin and unoriginal ing Verne’s occasional visits to the plot dressed up with far too much capital. botanical, zoological, and anthropo- It is therefore quite striking to logical detail. I found I was enjoy- see the Wesleyan edition of Verne’s ing Prof. Miller’s notes more than 1898 adventure story The Mighty Verne’s text. It was a macabre sort Orinoco describe itself, on the back of enjoyment, though, the kind of jacket, as having “a unique feminist dark pleasure one gets from watch- twist.” Really, though, this is making someone make a fool of himself, ing much out of nothing. The Mighty for the good professor is the kind of Orinoco, of which this is the first literary academic anxious—far too English translation (by Stanford L. anxious—to show you the racist, sex- Luce again) concerns a journey to the ist, colonialist subtext lying beneath source of that river by a mixed party every page. At the least excuse he of Frenchmen and Venezuelans. The lets fly with little po-mo homilies: Venezuelans are three geographers Patriarchal society glorifies cer- intent on settling a point of fact tain characteristics (logic, asser- about the river’s origin. Two of the tiveness, action) as “male” and French participants are young natu- others (emotion, timidity, passiv- ralists on a scientific expedition for ity) as “female.” Actually all per- the French government. The other sons of both sexes are made up of two are a young lad and his protec- both “masculine” and “feminine” tor, a gruff old NCO from the French traits, and if men developed their

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“female” side and women their series to appear (in January 2001), “male” side both genders [sic] the book is translated by Edward would enjoy a far greater chance Baxter, and annotated by DePauw to develop their full potential as University’s Arthur B. Evans, the human beings. most senior figure in Verne stud- This kind of thing is intended to ies outside France. Though nimble demonstrate how much less intel- with phrases like “the semiotic evolu- ligent and humane our benighted tion (didactic to hermeneutic) of this ancestors were compared with our brand of scientific-literary discourse,” enlightened selves. Prof. Evans is not as pugnaciously To chide Verne for not being on post- modernist as Prof. Miller. This board with the intellectual fads cur- unfortunately means that Invasion of rent in early twenty-first century the Sea offers no pleasures at all, not U.S. academe is misplaced, as Verne’s even subversive ones. The reader is comments about the Venezuelan alone with a group of French engi- Indians, and about such women as neers and their military escort in the he deigns to notice, are uniformly Algerian Sahara, parts of which are innocuous, when not actually benign. to be turned into an inland sea. The (He describes one tribe of Indians as Tuareg nomads of the region are “gentle in character, resourceful and naturally unfriendly to the idea, and intelligent.”) Academics must justify their efforts to thwart the French their existence, though; and it is, as supply such tension as the novel can I said, a kind of comic relief, after a muster. A French scholar quoted in dull dissertation on the appearance Prof. Evans’s notes thinks that “Jules and habits of the tapir, to turn to Verne actually admires and empa- Prof. Miller’s endnotes and find a thizes with” the Tuareg rebels and spirited rant against the wickedness their leader, but I must say I found of Pythagoras and Plato: “Even if this admiration and empathy hard to they did not believe in [metempsy- detect. chosis] themselves...[they] certain- o what degree can these four ly thought it convenient to teach it to books be said to belong to the masses as a means of controlling T science fiction? Only The Begum’s morals and politics.” Ah, the masses! Millions suggests any interesting What would humanities professors extrapolation of known science: an do without them? artillery shell filled with frozen car- y the last year of his life, when he bon dioxide, so that: “Every liv- Bwrote Invasion of the Sea, Verne ing being within a radius of thirty was tired, ill, and long since writ- meters from the center of the explo- ten out. The first of the Wesleyan sion is both frozen and asphyxi-

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Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. JULES VERNE: FATHER OF SCIENCE FICTION? ated!” Of the others, The Mysterious “believer,” this was part of the bour- Island gets in under the wire by its geois façade that Verne chose to live inclusion of Captain Nemo’s marvel- behind after some youthful dabbling ous submarine, Invasion of the Sea in la vie Bohème. He actually gave up by being set in the future (around attending Mass in the 1880s, and 1930, though it hardly matters). The probably died an agnostic. Mighty Orinoco contains no scientific Though a gifted storyteller, cer- mystery or invention at all, only a tainly in his early years, Verne had technical and incidental point about not sufficient powers of imagination, the source of the river. or scientific understanding, to rise to You could make a case, in fact, that true science fiction. Here the contrast Verne was not really interested in with his much younger (by 39 years) science at all but merely its techno- competitor for the “father of science logical applications. Certainly he was fiction” title, H. G. Wells, is most a magpie for curious technological striking. The concept of a fourth and biological factlets, and had a dimension, for example, first took fairly good head for numbers. The mathematical form in the 1840s. By imaginative side of science, though— 1870 it was, according to the mathe- the side that actually propels sci- matician Felix Klein, part of “the gen- ence forward—was a thing he had eral property of the advancing young no acquaintance with. I am sure he generation [of mathematicians].” would have been baffled by Vladimir Wells grasped the imaginative power Nabokov’s remark about “the pre- of this notion and used it to produce cision of the artist, the passion of one of the greatest of all science fic- the scientist.” The great pure-science tion stories, The Time Machine (1895). advances of his time made no impres- Verne never used it at all, and would sion on him. I do not know of any- probably have found the notion of a thing in Verne’s works that would be fourth dimension absurd. different if Maxwell’s equations had Gifted storytellers are rare enough not appeared in 1865. About Darwin’s that we should welcome them when theory he seems to have been utterly they appear, especially if they have a confused, employing a sort of crude strong appeal to young readers. The pop-Darwinism in books like The Mollweide projection of the earth’s Aerial Village (1901), yet declaring surface in my grandfather’s 1922 himself “entirely opposed to the the- Atlas-Guide to the British Commonwealth ories of Darwin” in an interview he of Nations and Foreign Countries still gave at about the same time. This has a jagged blue ballpoint line run- was not likely an opposition based on ning across it, made by the hand of religious belief. Though he always, a fascinated small boy circa 1956, to when asked, described himself as a trace the progress of Phileas Fogg on

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Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. JOHN DERBYSHIRE his eighty-day journey. The point of revolve around the fanciful possibili- science fiction, however, is something ties of technology to harness nature’s more than offering engrossing nar- powers, to aid human adventure, and rative. As stated by Kingsley Amis to rescue men from terrible perils. in his survey of the field (New Maps One of the blurbs on the Wesleyan of Hell, 1960), science fiction exists edition of The Mighty Orinoco, taken “to arouse wonder, terror, and excite- from the New York Times, calls Verne ment” in its readers. Verne rose to “the Michael Crichton of the nine- this challenge once or twice in his teenth century,” which I think is very early books—the mysteries and dan- precise, and conveys the same idea. gers of Journey to the Center of the True science fiction, however, began Earth, the many strange encounters twenty years after the masterpieces of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under of Verne’s youth, and on the other the Sea, the whirlwind escapades of side of the English Channel. Around the World in Eighty Days—but it is not met, nor even glimpsed, in John Derbyshire is a columnist for these four Wesleyan translations of National Review. His book Unknown later works. Quantity, a history of algebra, will Perhaps a better title for Verne is be published in May by Joseph Henry “Father of Tech-Fi,” of stories that Press.

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