Jules Verne lived, in the latter part of his life, in Amiens, north of Paris. I live in France now, but do not have a car. But I can get from Strasbourg to Amiens by train, some of it really high speed—something that would have fascinated Jules Verne, though not quite as much as the digital camera on which I made this video.
For those few of you who do not already know it, Jules Verne was one of the greatest French writers. He is often considered the father of science fiction or science adventure. This is certainly the case with his most famous novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The English translation was one of the first books I read that was not a little kid book, when I was in sixth grade. I was fascinated by all of the things Professor Arronax saw while on board the submarine Nautilus. I was also fascinated by the complex psychology of Captain Nemo (nemo means nobody) who used his submarine as a weapon against all of civilized mankind. The ending was so gripping that I had to read it three times. He also wrote From the Earth to the Moon. This is also easy to classify as science fiction. He also wrote some speculative fiction, such as Paris in the Twentieth Century, a work that did not see the light of day until it was found in a locked drawer after his death.
But readers were and are puzzled by some of his topics. How to explain, for example, Carpathian Castle? A lovelorn youth yearned for a beautiful woman who sang beautifully. When he climbed up to a mysterious castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania (Transylvania, in fact), he saw her, and heard her singing. Science fiction? Only in the sense that he was seeing a slide projection of her and hearing her voice on a phonograph, both of which were existing technologies when Verne wrote the novel.
While moon rockets and submarines were technological fiction from Verne’s imaginary future, other things were well in the past. People have puzzled at the novel Michael Strogoff about the czar’s courier carrying a message across Siberia. Adventure, yes, but not new technology, just as montgolfière balloons were not new when he wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon. But Michael Strogoff and Five Weeks fit right in with the other books in being an adventure that filled in big empty spaces on the map.
In each of his novels, most of which are still in circulation, his adventures were driven by character and struggle—like most other novels. What made Verne’s stand out is that the adventure was not all human drama: Verne added in the wonders of nature as well. The world is full of marvels, not just human struggles.
But these adventures had to be believable. The one exception to this pattern that I have found is Master of the World, in which an incredibly brilliant and evil man invented a machine that was a fast car when on land, an airplane while in the air, and a submarine while underwater. At least, I did not find this compelling, nor did the possible handful of other people who have read it.
I got to see Verne’s writing desk, at which he labored for many hours every day. I saw his telescope and globe. What I remember most, however, is his card file. I had one of those when I was in graduate school. In case you don’t know it, that is what we used as an information retrieval system before the interweb.
Verne was incredibly famous during his life. But movies were just becoming popular when he died. He could not have imagined how many movies, in how many countries, were made from his writings.
Visiting the Jules Verne house and museum was one of the things on my short bucket list. But it is amazing only to those of us who grew up admiring Jules Verne.
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