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Jules Verne was an unusual author as he was a French writer whose work was accepted and absorbed by the machine of English literature. Verne had invented the genres of science fiction, or ‘sci-fi’ as it is often abbreviated and there was no other English author writing on this subject at the time. Curiously Verne was thought of as an auteur pour les enfants in France. His fascination with futuristic science and fantastic situations was seen as rather puerile and fatuous alongside the serious and heavyweight novelists of his time, such as Honoré de Balzac.
In Britain it was another story. Scientific and technological progress had shaped the success of the British Empire and people were consequently far more open to Verne’s flights of fancy. He anticipated phenomena that seemed quite likely to occur from the British point of view, because they as a nation had been responsible for the lion’s share of advancements in science and technology that the world then enjoyed.
The translations of Verne’s work, however, often left something to be desired. They were heavily edited so that any perceived anti-British sentiment was erased, thus making the works unfaithful to Verne’s original manuscripts for the sake of political correctness. In addition to this political censoring, the translators had problems with transliterating measurements and calculations from metric to imperial standards. Verne had been fastidious in his scientific accuracy, thereby lending his work a weight of scientific realism and authenticity, while the translators in contrast had been rather lackadaisical in their efforts so that the precision was lost, literally, in translation. Educated and learned English readers, thinking the translations to be true, thought of Verne as a little facile, coming up with sound basic ideas but failing in his attention to detail. Even in the mid-19th century people understood the importance of research in making a novel credible.
Despite these setbacks, Verne became the ‘Father of sci-fi’ by pioneering the genre. His canon includes Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). He even anticipated space flight with De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) and Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon). His modus operandi was to have a group of people embark on a journey of adventure and he wrote an incredible 54 novels using this theme, which have become known collectively as Les Voyages Extraordinaire (The Extraordinary Voyages).
These days literary types tend to look down their noses at science fiction, as if the genre is inferior to others. This is partly because of the over abundance of poorly conceived science fiction novels, but it is also due to the relative lack of characterization and exploration of human themes. While literary works tend to rely on investigating the nature of relationships and behaviour, science fiction stories pay scant attention to such topics and focus instead on the events and situations in which the characters find themselves. The same is true of thrillers, adventures and fantasies, which are often frequently accorded similar disregard.
In Victorian times, such distinctions between novel genres had yet to germinate and grow, because things were still in a stake of flux. As Verne had invented the concept of science fiction story telling, most of the work immediately influenced by him, such as that by H.G. Wells, was also of a high quality. It was really the age of pulp fiction – so called because of the throwaway nature of paperback books – that standards began to fall.
Rampant consumerism meant that substandard writers had their material go to print and so it became ever more difficult to see the wood for the trees in terms of writing quality. It became necessary to invent the term ‘literary novel’ as a badge of distinction to mark a book out as having supposedly been written by someone with a little more creative integrity than the rest.
Verne’s Prophecy
With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back at the novels of Jules Verne to analyse the extent to which his predictions came true. Verne wasn’t a dystopian science fiction writer, so he didn’t portend future catastrophes. He was more utopian in his imaginings, although curiously his stories are not set in the future as such. Instead, they are presented in a parallel world, where new sciences and technologies enable 19th-century adventurers to go about their business. They are therefore ‘science fiction’, but not strictly futuristic. The first book to take a character forwards in time was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Of course, the central character also travels backwards in time, to prehistory.
Verne’s agenda was really about asking the question ‘what if?’ What if people could dig to the centre of the earth, travel beneath the waves, journey to the moon or fly around the world? As a consequence, he quite logically invented the vehicles and equipment he imagined they would need. He was being pragmatic and he implemented his contemporaneous understanding of science in both designing paraphernalia and deciding what problems different environments might throw up.
As scientists did not understand earth dynamics until the latter half of the 20th century, it was conceivable at the time that one could dig to the centre of the planet, just as his characters do in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Similarly, in From the Earth to the Moon he has his characters employing a canon to fire them to the moon. This wouldn’t work on two levels. Nevertheless, Verne did anticipate space flight, the submarine, mechanical flying machines, tunnelling machines and so on. Some of these were already in the embryonic stages of their development into operational and practical devices of course, although it is not entirely clear whether Verne knew about any of them or was genuinely basing his ideas on original thought.
No matter, for Verne was a novelist, not an inventor and his application of science and technology was all about creating the necessary illusion to make the reader believe in the adventure. By the time anyone knew any better he and his readership were consigned to history.
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