April 15, 2013

Verne, Jules

Tagged: Author

(1828-1905) French playwright and novelist, generally thought of as one of the two founding fathers of sf – the other being H G Wells – though neither claimed this status for himself or for the other, nor did either of them claim to be originating a new genre. In general, Wells has not suffered in critical esteem from an awareness that perhaps his greatest – certainly his most intense – works were his early Scientific Romances. A similar maturity of assessment did not, until recently, characterize French scholarship on Verne, who even in France was sidelined as an author for children, which he both was and patently was not. Even more damningly, he was described as an author who could not write (that he was not a "stylist" is obvious, but that he was a careful and penetrating manipulator of writerly tools, some of them now understood as sophisticatedly metafictional, has now become widely understood). English-language appreciation of his work was of course crippled by the wide-spread badness of translations of his work, many of these being silently expurgated, most of them abridged, and in many cases actively misrepresented by the insertion of passages not written by him. It is not surprising that Verne has been dismissed by serious critics.

But the discovery of the complexity and grasp of his huge oeuvre in France during the twentieth century has finally cast into serious doubt his century-long exclusion from the canon of great nineteenth-century French authors; and for readers in English, a range of serious critical studies of Verne has proliferated since about 1980 (see about the author below), along with the publication of a growing number of competent complete translations. Readers and critics are now beginning to understand Verne's enterprise, relentlessly promulgated over dozens of long novels, as more than an attempt to entertain children while teaching them facts about the measurable world; as more than comprising a Baedeker to lands either under the sway of the European empires (> Imperialism), or about to be; as more than a long advertisement for Progress; as more than a series of exercises in the mechanics, the physics, and the metaphysics of Transportation. That the full complexity of his vast oeuvre can be understood as having some generative relationship to sf – to the various genres and clusters of concern that would eventually be understood as fathering the twentieth-century form – seems more obvious now than a century ago.

Sadly, in their belated discovery of Verne, French critics have shown a tendency to "rescue" him from being thought of as an sf writer at all, some going so far as to suggest that he should not be thought of as a "father of science fiction" because so many of his novels stayed strictly within realistic bounds. Several definitions of sf have been used to save Verne from the onus of having written the form, most of these ignoring Verne's deeply sf-like focus on world-encompassing mechanisms of change, focusing instead on a conveniently procrustean restriction of sf to works of literal anticipation, and therefore not related to Verne, whose essential project (it is claimed) was "instead" to decipher and negotiate with and ultimately to conquer the given world. However, from the broad-church point of view of this encyclopedia – and without any need to settle on a prescriptive Definition of SF to special-plead the case, or to speak at length about the inherently transgressive sf "gaze" upon the world's workings – it is easy to think of a substantial number of Verne's works as being sf at the most obvious level. Space Flight, by gun and by "comet", to instance the most transparently iconic sf device of all, is conspicuous in the oeuvre. Throughout his work can be found elaborate dramatizations of how to access the world through the use of forms of Transportation not possible at the time of writing: another sure marker of nineteenth-century sf in the making. Inventions – usually based directly on contemporary Power Sources like electricity, but often extrapolated far beyond the immediately possible – are found throughout the work. The theory of Evolution conspicuously underlies Verne's thinking about race (> Race in SF; Imperialism), though he does not in fact accept the Darwinian version; and Apes as Human cultures feature in more than one tale. The floating Islands featured in several novels are not only impossible in terms of the science of the time, but provide a deeply Verne-like venue for the display and examination of Utopias and Dystopias, as do his Robinsonades. The Hollow Earth is explored more than once. Weapons far more powerful than then possible, and other Near Future Disasters, threaten the future stability of Europe and the world. There are Mad Scientists gazing at the future in order to own it. There is at least one instance of Time Travel.

It is, of course, possible to err by an excessive inclusiveness; to search out subtle tints of the near future, or for technologies arguably not yet quite possible; most of Verne's work is not sf, and will not be discussed here in terms that imply it should have been. Nor should the focus here on Verne's obvious use of sf be seen as deprecatory of other approaches, even to the same work, for he is clearly a legitimate object of pluralistic study. It does remain the case, however, that along with H G Wells Jules Verne is indeed the "father of science fiction", not only for the reasons iterated above, but because, like Wells, he was so deeply influential on other writers whose work has always been understood as sf. In France alone a short sample of Verne's immediate children would include Louis Boussenard, André Laurie, Albert Robida, J-H Rosny aîné, and indeed his own son, Michel Verne, even though the latter wrote only in his father's name.

In some ways, all the same, the linking of these parent figures is deceptive. Verne was a pragmatic, middle-class entrepreneur of letters, and at least during the first decade or so of his career seemed wholeheartedly to espouse a clear-eyed optimism about Progress and European Man's central role in the world typical of high nineteenth-century culture. But as has been shown by recent studies of the literary and marketing environment in which his books appeared, as well as of his original manuscripts (and the publication in France of scholarly editions based on these original sources), it is clear that Verne wrote under more than one constraint. Under incessant pressure from his publisher, Jules Hetzel, he edited and toned down before publication any manuscript in which he spoke his mind about nationalism, Religion, the state of France, and Politics in general. Moreover, Hetzel himself expurgated and softened Verne's final manuscripts. His now notorious refusal to publish Paris au XXe siècle (written 1863, 1994; trans Richard Howard as Paris in the Twentieth Century 1996) (see below) was merely his usual behaviour taken to an extreme.

Wells was a different kind of parent. Born almost forty years later than Verne and into a freer clime, and never beholden to any one publisher (he had in fact more than twenty of them), he was a threatening freelance figure from his earliest days, when his Scientific Romances exuded and helped to define the doom-laden fin-de-siècle atmosphere of the old century's hectic, premonition-filled climax. Nor is there any evidence that he wrote under the control (even benign) of anyone. Before long, in any case, he essentially stopped writing the kind of tale that gave him his great initial fame, and was subsequently impolite to those who continued to value him most for his speculative fiction, or to write under influence of his early work.Verne never truly abandoned his readers, or those who wrote sf because he had shown the way, even though his later novels were significantly darker in texture and more pessimistic in implication than the tales for which he remains, not entirely unjustly, best remembered.

Verne was born and raised in the port of Nantes, and it is probably no coincidence that the sea appears in a large number of his best and most romantic novels. His father was a successful lawyer and assumed that Verne would eventually take over his practice, but from an early age the child rebelled against this form of worldly success (though, true to his time, his rebelliousness did not express itself in disdain for the things of the world). It seems that his first declaration of independence was an attempt to switch places with a ship's cabin-boy, and that he was extricated only after the vessel had actually left harbour; but recent scholarship has suggested that the incident was invented by Verne's first biographer. By young adulthood, in any case, Verne's romantic flamboyance took a more productive course. He went to Paris on an allowance and, under the influence of such writers as Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895), wrote a good deal of drama (at least twenty plays, only now most of them reaching publication), romantic verse and libretti, several of which were produced, and fiction of variable quality in more than one nonfantastic genre [see translations identified as belonging to the Palik Series in Checklist]. He soon made the significant discovery of Edgar Allan Poe, whose solitary flyting melancholy he somewhat misread as a kind of romantic adventurousness, and under this influence published his first tale of sf interest, "La science en famille. Un voyage en ballon. (Réponse à l'énigme de juillet.)" (August 1851 Musée, seconde série; trans Anne T Wilbur, May 1852 Sartain's Union Magazine,as "A Voyage in a Balloon"); this tale was eventually republished in Le Docteur Ox. Maître Zacharius. Un drame dans les airs. Un hivernage dans les glaces. Quarantième ascension française au mont Blanc (coll 1874; part trans George H Towle as Doctor Ox and Other Stories 1874), the only collection of stories Verne published in the Voyages extraordinaires (see below). Also in this volume appeared the more interesting early story "Maître Zacharius" ["Master Zacharius"] (April 1854 Musée, seconde série), an allegory about time, a clockmaker and the Devil. Both stories demonstrate from how early a date Verne developed his characteristic technique of embedding speculative quasiscientific explanations into seemingly straightforward adventures imbued with the romance of fact-based geography.

[NB: As with Doctor Ox above, we list in the text of this entry only the first English translation of any Verne title. For a full breakdown of variously entitled translations, many of them with vts – variant titles – in tow, see Checklist.]

Despite early hints of the course he was to follow, Verne felt himself only marginally successful as a writer, and with his father's help he soon turned to stockbroking, an occupation he maintained until 1862, when his singularly important association with Jules Hetzel began. Verne had come to him with a narrative about travelling in Balloons (it was apparently couched in semi-documentary form); when Hetzel suggested that he properly novelize his story, Verne did so eagerly and swiftly, and the renovated tale, published as Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; trans "William Lackland" as Five Weeks in a Balloon, or Journeys and Discoveries in Africa, by Three Englishmen 1869), began the long series of what would not formally be designated the Voyages extraordinaires ["Extraordinary Journeys"] until the publication of Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1866 2vols; trans anon as A Journey to the North Pole 1874), though Hetzel labelled subsequent reprints of the first three novels as part of the series; almost all Verne's works from 1866 until his death were published as Voyages extraordinaires. In this first tale, which was still comparatively primitive, three colleagues decide to try to cross Africa in a balloon, have numerous adventures as they go, and learn a great deal about Africa. But Five Weeks in a Balloon lacks the hectic, romantic intensity of Verne's best work, those stories whose displacement from normal realities allowed him to transcend the element of illustrated travelogue which occasionally domesticated – in a negative sense – his fiction.

His next novel, Paris au XXe Siècle (written 1863; 1994; trans Richard Howard as Paris in the Twentieth Century 1996), caused a considerable stir on its eventual discovery in manuscript form and subsequent publication. Set in 1960, and depicting a Dystopian corporate/market-based hegemony in surprisingly grim terms, the tale is remarkable on several counts. It contradicts any sense that Verne's cultural pessimism came from the disappointments of old age, or that it was the whole-cloth creation of his son, Michel Verne (1861-1925), who was indeed wholly or partially responsible for stories like "In the Year 2889" (February 1889 The Forum), originally published in English and variously modified, as described by Arthur B Evans in "The 'New' Jules Verne" (March 1995 Science Fiction Studies). The novel is also noteworthy for the wide range and accuracy of its Predictions – 1960 Paris boasts automobiles, pneumatic tube-trains, Computers and faxes – all the more surprising, given the wide assumption that Verne's almost total refusal to set any of the Voyages extraordinaires in the future demonstrated his inability to make proper sf extrapolations (it now seems clear, however, that Hetzel did not wish to publish works not safely grounded in the present or near past). The 1994 publication of Paris in the Twentieth Century also roused some suspicions about the date and actual authorship of the text; these suspicions are acutely analysed by Evans, who treats them as natural but, in this case, unfounded.

Verne's next published novel, Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; exp 1867; trans anon as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872), abandons futurity and the revised version, which intensifies the action and expands the protagonists' debate over Evolution, is the first to convey what became the trademark Vernean frisson, in the early books at least (certainly in the versions Hetzel allowed): a sense of moral clarity and even compassion (villains are very rare); the safety of numbers (multiple protagonists were usual); and a sense of coming very close to but never toppling over the edge of the known. In this novel three protagonists take part variously in an expedition into the core of a dormant volcano which leads them eventually into the dark Hollow Earth itself. There are sightings of Dinosaurs and cavemen. Verne's engaging wonderment at the world's marvels in tales of this sort goes far to explain the success he was began, almost immediately, to achieve; and was conveyed with a childlike exuberance and clarity that gave evolving sf tropes and topoi like the fabulous Underground caves of this tale, an intensely memorable shape. His tripartite division of protagonists (one a Scientist, one an intensely active, athletic type, the third a more or less ordinary man representative of the reader's point of view) sorted out didactic duties and narrative pleasures remarkably well.

In the meantime, Hetzel was planning a magazine for young readers, and in 1864 founded Le Magasin d'Education et de Récréation. Verne was central to the enterprise – the first issue began with his serialization of Les adventures du Capitaine Hatteras (20 March 1864-5 December 1865 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation as "Les Anglais au pôle Nord: Le désert de glace"; 1864 2vols; vol 1, Les Anglais au pôle nord [1864], trans anon as The English at the North Pole 1874) – and most (though by no mean all) of his novels were first published there. The years of his greatest public success, and of his most intense use of the instruments of sf, had arrived. Hatteras itself, a brilliant novel conspicuously not described as sf by its critical admirers, tracks an unrelenting hunt for the North Pole by the obsessed Hatteras, who himself has proto-Superman characteristics (including an immunity to cold), but puts himself and his colleagues at profound risk; the explorers succeed all the same in reaching a mild circumpolar sea, which Lost-World-like abounds with prehistoric Monsters. The North Pole itself is an active volcano, though it does not – as in any Hollow Earth novel written according to the Symmesian hypothesis (> John Cleves Symmes) – lead Hatteras into the heart of the world.

Verne gained further renown with the first volumes of his first series, the Around the Moon sequence comprising De la terre à la Lune: Trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (14 September-14 October 1865 Journal de Débats politiques et littéraires as "De la Terre à la Lune. Trajet direct en 97 heures"; 1865; trans J K Hoyte as From the Earth to the Moon, Passage Direct in 97 Hours and 20 Minutes 1869); Autour de la Lune: Seconde partie de: De la Terre à la Lune (4 November-8 December 1869 Journal de Débats politiques et littéraires; 1870; both vols trans Lewis Mercier and Eleanor King as From the Earth to the Moon Direct in 97 hours 20 minutes, and a Trip Around It 1873); and Sans dessus dessous (1889; trans anon as The Purchase of the North Pole 1890). The choice of a gun to fire the members of the Baltimore Gun Club around the Moon was not, perhaps, a good anticipation of Space Flight; but the epic exudes a natty exhilaration, and in the end the Moon, once safely circumnavigated, is left to its own resources.

Of greater sf importance was his second series, the Captain Nemo sequence comprising Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (20 March 1869-20 March 1870 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation; 1870 2vols; trans Lewis Mercier as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872) and L'île mystérieuse (1 December 1874-5 December 1875 Le Temps; 1874-1875 3vols; first full ed trans W H G Kingston as The Mysterious Island 1875 3vols), a Robinsonade, both titles being severely edited to remove any imputation that Nemo had just cause to take revenge on European sea powers. As the sequence now stands, Nemo is an Antihero less enigmatic than obscured, less Byronic than simply calumniated by the novel's narrator; though later generations of readers have found him more easy to empathize with than Hetzel could have anticipated. The Nautilus, his electricity-powered submarine – electricity being a favourite anticipatory Power Source in the sf of the time – is capable of making long luxurious voyages Under the Sea, including a visit to the ruins of Atlantis, with the cast amply and comfortingly coddled in chambers exuding Second Empire plushness; this presentation of ornate luxury enabled by advanced Technology is one of the central iconic images (> Icons) of the romance of nineteenth-century sf, and prefigures Steampunk. Equally well known as a novel, Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (6 November-22 December 1872 Le Temps; 1873; trans Geo M Towle as Around the World in Eighty Days 1874) is not sf (The Other Log of Phileas Fogg [1973] Philip José Farmer's sequel, rectifies this mundanity), for Verne conceived his protagonist's journey around the world entirely in terms of travel arrangements then existing, basing Fogg's trip on a real journey by the US entrepreneur, traveller and eccentric George Francis Train (1829-1904).

Several other sf tales are of interest, including the title novel assembled in "Une Ville flottante" suivi de "Les Forceurs de blocus" (9 August-6 September 1871 Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires; coll 1871; trans anon as The Floating City and the Blockade Runners 1876), the first of the floating Island novels, the most extreme of these being the much later L'Île à hélice (1 January-15 December 1895 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (seconde série); 1895 2vols; trans W J Gordon as The Floating Island; or, The Pearl of the Pacific 1987 UK), in which the human race is implicitly anatomized as incapable of making even a microcosm of the world work. Hector Servadac: voyages et aventures à travers le monde solaire (1 January-15 December 1877 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation; 1877 2vols; trans Ellen Elizabeth Frewer as Hector Servadac 1878) is perhaps the most remarkable of Verne's mid-period works: a fragment of the planet is knocked into space by a huge Asteroid, along with a microcosm of humanity, which survives vacuum and other tribulations, circumnavigates the Sun, and returns two years later to an Earth magically untransformed by the Disaster. In the introduction to his translation of this work [see Checklist], Adam Roberts shows that Hetzel would not permit Verne to close a novel in the midst of a transformed world (indeed, Verne's protagonists normally brings their gifts of travel back to an unchanged Europe). But the title novel assembled in Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum: suivi de Les Révoltés de la "Bounty" (title novel: 1 January-15 September 1879 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation as "Les 500 Millions de la Bégum": 1879; title novel trans anon as The 500 Millions of the Begum 1879) seems to have escaped serious censorship (though the initial translation is very bad), perhaps because the mogul who has created a quasi-Underground, hellish Dystopia – at the heart of which a super-Weaponself-propelled flying bomb is aimed at the heart of civilization – is in fact German.

There is some doubt that Verne's late Robinsonades are as toothless as nineteenth-century translations have made them seem. The better-known titles are L'école des Robinsons (1 January-1 December 1882 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation: 1882; trans W J Gordon as Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery 1883) and the late, nostalgic Deux ans de vacances, ou un pensionnat de Robinsons (1 January-15 December 1888 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation; 1888 2vols; trans anon as Adrift in the Pacific 1889). Both exploit the romantic implications of being cast alone or with a few companions into the bosom of a bounteous Nature, and the didactic possibilities inherent in the project of re-creating a civilized life; Verne's robinsonades are carefully socialized, and their small groups of protagonists always make do very well together, as far as English readers are aware.

All the same, the surface of his more significant later sf novels increasingly reveals a grimmer palette. That, and their inescapable pessimism about the enterprise of European imperial civilization, may have impeded their full acceptance, even now – this, ironically, at a time when he had become an Icon of the European imperium at its most triumphant. The 1889 World's Fair in Paris featured, for instance, rides in which customers could go around the world in eighty days, or 20,000 leagues under the sea, a techno-fetishism far distant (Roger Luckhurst argues, see about the author below) from Verne's own "internationalist rejection of nationalism" as represented by Captain Nemo (certainly in the original text of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea). Le Château des Carpathes (1 January 1892-15 December 1892 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation; 1892; trans anon as The Castle of the Carpathians 1893) darkly associates Inventions with psychopathology, as the owner of the Chateau recreates through an advanced phonograph and magic mirror tricks the ghostly presence of the diva whose death has unbalanced him. More significantly, the Robur the Conqueror sequence – comprising Robur-le-Conquérant (9 June-18 August 1886 Journal des Débats politiques et littéraire; 1886; trans anon as Robur the Conqueror; Or, A Trip Round the World in a Flying Machine 1887) and Maître du monde (1 July-15 December 1904 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (seconde série); 1904; trans anon as The Master of the World 1911 US) – reads almost as a black parody of Captain Nemo. It is true that in the first tale the steely, megalomaniacal Robur, inventor of an impressive flying machine, even though he is rendered less favourably than an earlier romantic figure like Nemo, is still allowed by Verne to represent the march of scientific progress as he forces the world to listen to him. But in the second book, Verne's last work of any significance, Robur has become a dangerous madman, a Mad Scientist fatally detached from the darkening world, blasphemous and uncontrollable; his excesses – like those of Wells's Dr Moreau – seem to represent the excesses of an unfettered development of science. Science and a subservient, bounteous Nature are no longer seen – in late Verne or early Wells – as benevolently united under Man's imperious control.

Even more savage, L'Île à hélice (1 January-15 December 1895 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (seconde série); 1895 2vols; trans W J Gordon as The Floating Island; or, The Pearl of the Pacific 1896) is an unremitting Satire on the pretences of Western Civilization to govern the world: in the moderately distant Near Future, a string quartet (> Arts) is abducted from North America – now completely under American rule – and deposited on Standard Island, a huge Island Keep which, driven by vast propellers around the Pacific, serves as a "paradise" for extremely wealthy capitalists. The string quartet, offered vast sums, makes some music, and there are Inventions galore; but unfortunately, schisms amongst the presiding owners of the West – plus an invasion of wild beasts – ensure the sinking of the island,and all it stands for. And in Le Village aérien (1 January-15 June 1901 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (seconde série); 1901; trans I O Evans as The Village in the Tree Tops 1964), Verne now accepts Darwinian Evolution sufficiently to grant the survival into modern times of the Waggids, a subhuman species (> Apes as Human; Prehistoric SF) which has fallen under the sway of a Mad Scientist; lacking Religion, the Waggids can never be fully human.

From Le Phare au bout du monde (1905 2vols; trans Cranston Metcalfe as The Lighthouse at the End of the World 1923) to L'Étonnante Aventure de la mission Barsac (1920 2vols; trans I O Evans as The Barsac Mission 1960 2vols), Verne's posthumous novels present a serious problem for the scholar and the reader. [For bibliographical comments, see general explanatory notes under Voyages extraordinaires below, and individual titles under Voyages extraordinaires: Posthumous.] For the non-specialist reader, two suggestions should be taken into account regarding Michel Verne's editing and rewriting of these novels, and of the stories assembled in Hier et demain (see comment below). One: it is clear that Michel Verne actually improved some of his father's manuscripts, all of them written in his last years, when his energies were at times seriously depleted. Le Volcan d'or (1906; 2vols; restored text 1989; trans Edward Baxter of restored text as The Golden Volcano: The First English Translation of Verne's Original Manuscript 2008) seems to be a case in point. Two: it is clear that Verne's original manuscripts, as published and translated in recent years, should take precedence over the modified versions, whether or not they are rough or feeble, and that in fact Michel Verne habitually adulterated his father's pessimism about the twentieth century, softening his disaffection into bromides. It is certainly the case that the original version of Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1910; restored version 1985; trans of original version Peter Schuman as The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz: The First English Translation of Verne's Original Manuscript 2011) is markedly superior to Michel Verne's redaction. It is, in fact, a tale of considerable grimness, in which the eponymous Antihero applies his Invention of an Invisibility Ray to render himself and the girl he lusts after both invisible; on his death, the secret of his invention still unveiled, the girl remains invisible, though she marries the narrator of the tale in this apparently permanent condition. In its original state, this novel very clearly works as a thematic pendant to H G Wells's The Invisible Man (1897).

Verne's life had been externally uneventful from the 1860s on. He married, prospered mightily, lived in a large provincial house, yachted occasionally, unflaggingly produced his novels for the firm of Hetzel and became an exemplary nineteenth-century French middle-class dignitary. While his early works inevitably expose the boyish, escapist dream-life of that class, they can also be read as an ultimate requiem for the dream of his astonishing and transformative century, that waking dream of the daylight decades so effectively fleshed in his early work. But long before 1900 that vision – that dream that the world was both illimitable and decipherable, unknown but obedient; and that Man could only improve upon creation – seemed to have begun to fade, as demonstrated (see above) in his last novels, though perhaps most clearly in a remarkable Ruined Earth tale, "The Eternal Adam" from Hier et demain [for full title see Checklist] (coll 1910; trans I O Evans as Yesterday and Tomorrow 1965), in which a far-future historian (> Ruins and Futurity) discovers to his dismay that twentieth-century civilization was overthrown by geological cataclysms, and that the legend of Adam and Eve was both true and cyclical. No manuscript in Verne's hand exists of this story, which may have been written in large part by his son, Michel Verne [see Checklist]; but it clearly reflects Verne's late state of mind, and has more than once been treated as a thematic summation of his career. That career is too vast to be rewritten in hindsight, or comprehended in terms of the pessimism of his last years. It contains much that is probably irretrievably distant for modern readers, silenced by the century and a half of changes he did not quite allow himself to address in his whole voice. But there is also much in Verne that the last half century of critical study has begun to make audible. It is a voice that did, we increasingly understand, speak to the future.

Verne's work has always been attractive to film-makers, and as early as 1902 Georges Méliès loosely adapted From the Earth to the Moon to make Voyage dans la Lune. It was not until Verne's work came out of copyright in the 1950s, however, that the real rush started, beginning with Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in Les Naufragés du "Jonathan" 1954. Other Verne adaptations were Around the World in 80 Days (1956), From the Earth to the Moon (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Mysterious Island (1961), Master of the World (1961) and Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962). The Czech film Vynález Zkázy (1958), released in the USA as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, was a blend of live action and animation. Verne's characters have been revived in various, sometimes embarrassing guises, as in Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969). [JC]

see also: Anthropology; Astronomy; Austria; Benelux; Biology; Boys' Papers; Children's SF; Dime-Novel SF; Fantastic Voyages; France; Gothic SF; History of SF; Machines; Music; Optimism and Pessimism; SF Music; Scientific Errors; Spaceships; Urban Legends.

Jules Gabriel Verne

born Nantes, France: 8 February 1828

died Amiens, France: 24 March 1905

works

series

Voyages extraordinaires

Given the wide range in quality and accuracy of early translations of Verne – many of them, as already stated, cut, mutilated and rewritten – and given the difficulty of tracing these changes in detail, we make no serious attempt to register specific deformations of the original novels, especially those committed in the nineteenth century. To compensate, at the beginning of the relevant comment fields below we mark with a pilcrow – ¶ – texts we've selected from a range of specifically recommended translations in Arthur B Evans's essential "A Bibliography of Jules Verne's English Translations" (March 2005 Science Fiction Studies: vol 32, part 1: whole #95); an examination of Evans's precisely graded recommendations as a whole makes it clear that, for the more obscure titles, nineteenth-century translations are often recommended faute de mieux. Where Evans cannot find a recommendable translation for the period before 2005, we have not inserted one. We have however ourselves added pilcrows for relevant translations published from 2005 on.

The actual size of the oeuvre initiated by Five Weeks in a Balloon has, it might seem oddly, been subject to various estimates. This is probably due to the varying formats in which the Voyages extraordinaires were issued; and upon a misunderstanding of the contract between Verne and Hetzel, the terms of which (for a considerable period) required him to produce three volumes a year (this was eventually reduced to two), as can be seen by counting individual volumes registered below. The misunderstanding arises when "volumes" are confused with "titles". The Voyages extraordinaires consists of fifty-four novels published before Verne's death; these were variously released in one or two or three volumes, sometimes with shorter works appended as makeweights. Two or three of Verne's few novels not published in the series are also of sf interest. Of the approximately sixty novels in the oeuvre, about a quarter could be described without qualification as sf.

Eight posthumous titles in the Voyages extraordinaires appeared by 1920, seven of them modified to some degree by Verne's son Michel Verne, and one of them – L'Agence Thompson and C° (1907) (see Checklist below) – entirely by him. The extent to which these texts could be described as inauthentic became a serious issue in the 1980s, when the Société Jules Verne in France began to republish Verne's original manuscripts, ostensibly unmodified (though some redemptive copy-editing, similar to that conducted by Michel on his father's drafts before and after his death, was in fact imposed). Seven of these novels, therefore, now exist in two distinct versions, see Checklist below, under Voyages extraordinaires: Posthumous.

We have not attempted to penetrate the arcana surrounding first editions of Verne in the Voyages extraordinaires, though we feel the editions listed below are probably correct as regards the proper year of first book publication (Hetzel seems to have issued various versions in differing bindings almost simultaneously). Consequently, though we do not attempt to indicate the presence or absence of cover illustrations, we do however attempt to credit illustrators whose work appears in at least some version of the initial text. No attempt has been made to trace origins of illustrations in English language publications; it is likely that uncredited illustrations were taken from the original French editions. Though the Voyages extraordinaires sequence was not formally so named until 1866, we follow common usage and apply the designation as well to the three novels published before that date. At this point we list one title whose insertion within the Checklist at any particular juncture would be confusing; the translations of all titles in this omnibus are recommended:

  • Amazing Journeys: Five Visionary Classics (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press/Excelsior Editions, 2010) [¶ omni: trans by Frederick Paul Walter of Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Circling the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in 80 Days: titles as given by Walter: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: Voyages extraordinaires: Captain Nemo: Voyages extraordinaires: pb/]

The three subseries contained in the Voyages extraordinaires are listed initially, followed by individual titles in the overall series, and then by posthumous titles, none of them by Verne alone.

The Checklist below has been corrected and augmented by Mike Ashley.

Voyages extraordinaires

Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon

  • De la Terre à la Lune: Trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (Paris: J Hetzel et Cie, 1865) [first appeared 14 September-14 October 1865 Journal de Débats politiques et littéraires as "De la Terre à la Lune. Trajet direct en 97 heures": Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: illus/de Montaut: hb/]
    • "From the Earth to the Moon" (trans anon of the above: first appeared 26 January-30 March 1867 New York Weekly Magazine) [the putative 1867 edition by Gage seems not to have been released: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: hb/]
    • From the Earth to the Moon: Passage Direct in 97 Hours and 20 Minutes (Newark, New Jersey: The Newark Printing and Publishing Company, 1869) [trans by J K Hoyt of the above: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: hb/]
    • The Baltimore Gun Club (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: King & Baird, 1874) [trans and expansion by Edward Roth of the above: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: hb/]
    • The American Gun Club (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co, 1874) [trans by Louis Mercier and Eleanor E King of the above: this volume comprises a revision of the first half of From the Earth to the Moon Direct, in Ninety-seven Hours Twenty Minutes, and a Trip Around it, see below under Autour de la Lune: excerpt trans Frank R Stockton first appeared January 1874 Scribner's Monthly as "The Great Air Line to the Moon": Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: hb/]
    • From the Earth to the Moon (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1876) [trans of the above: first appeared July-December 1873 St James' Magazine: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: pb/]
    • From the Earth to the Moon (New York: Bantam Pathfinder, 1967) [trans by Lowell Blair of the above: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: pb/]
    • From the Earth to the Moon (London: J M Dent, 1970) [trans by Jacqueline and Robert Baldick of the above: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: illus/hb/]
    • The Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (New York: Thomas Y Crowell and Co, 1978) [¶ trans by Walter James Miller of the above: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: pb/]
  • Autour de la Lune: Seconde partie de: De la Terre à la Lune (Paris: J Hetzel et Cie, 1870) [first appeared 4 November-8 December 1869 Journal de Débats politiques et littéraires: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: illus/Emile Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville: hb/]
  • Sans dessus dessous (Paris: J Hetzel et Cie, 1889) [Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: hb/]
    • Topsy-Turvy (New York: Ogilvie, 1890) [trans anon of the above: Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: hb/]
    • The Purchase of the North Pole: A Sequel to "From the Earth to the Moon" (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1890) [trans anon of the above: first appeared 1 March-5 July 1890 The Boy's Own Paper as "Barbicane & Co; Or, the Purchase of the Pole": Voyages extraordinaires: Around the Moon: illus/Georges Roux: hb/]

Voyages extraordinaires: Captain Nemo

Voyages extraordinaires: Robur the Conqueror

  • Robur-le-Conquérant (Paris: J Hetzel et Cie, 1886) [first appeared 9 June-18 August 1886 Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires: Voyages extraordinaires: Robur the Conqueror: illus/Léon Benett: hb/]
  • Maître du monde (Paris: J Hetzel et Cie, 1904) [first appeared 1 July-15 December 1904 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (seconde série): Voyages extraordinaires: Robur the Conqueror: illus/George Roux: hb/]
    • The Master of the World (New York: Vincent Parke, 1911) [trans anon of the above: Voyages extraordinaires: Robur the Conqueror: hb/]
    • The Master of the World: A Tale of Mystery and Marvel (London: Sampson Low, 1914) [¶ trans by Cranstoun Metcalfe of the above: first appeared November 1913-April 1914 The Boy's Own Paper: Voyages extraordinaires: Robur the Conqueror: illus/hb/uncredited]
      • Master of the World (London: Arco, 1962) [cut by I O Evans: vt of the above translation: Voyages extraordinaires: Robur the Conqueror: hb/Jozef Gross]

Voyages extraordinaires: individual titles

Voyages extraordinaires: Posthumous

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