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Jules Verne
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 Jules Verne is one of the four 19th century writers (with Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and H. G.
Wells) without whose work science fiction would not exist today. Before he ever wrote one of his imaginary
voyages, he wrote a long article on Poe for a leading French magazine, Musee des Familles, noting particularly Poe's
use of science for verisimilitude. Verne's voyages to the Moon, to the center of the earth, under the sea, around
the world in the fabulously rapid time of 80 days, all use advanced technology based on exact and real
contemporary science. He, and his audience, had a taste and a patience for exposition and explanation to an extent
now out of fashion in literature, although expository detail has remained an integral, essential element of hard
science fiction. In addition, he was an essential founder of the optimistic attitude in the literature that
science will take you places, do things, solve problems. Verne became rich and famous for his novels in the
extraordinary voyage genre, one of the vigorous precursors of sf.
It is the fiction of Jules Verne that most influenced Hugo Gernsback, always a devotee of
extensive expository detail, in the years before he decided to declare the birth of a new genre in 1926. Clearly, one of
Gernsback's prime motives was didactic -- one need only glance at Gernsback's own fiction, for instance
his novel, Ralph 124C 41+ (1925), a forest of exposition, with only a nod to plot and characterization. And it
is the moral sentiment and didactic enthusiasm of Verne, whom Gernsback reprinted often in the early issues
of Amazing Stories, that encouraged early genre sf writers in the tendency to create a juvenile literature,
thrilling wonder stories for boys and young men.
Worth noting is the fact that Verne's later works, in the 1880s and later, are darker in mood and
progressively less optimistic about science and technology. But these novels, from
The Begum's Fortune (1880) to Master of the
World (1904), were eclipsed by the continuing popularity of his earlier works. Verne
always stressed his scientific accuracy, a hallmark of the hard sf attitude, though modern devotees of hard sf never
tire of pointing out that he was often ignorant of one or another scientific principle (for instance, there is only
a moment of zero gee in From Earth to the
Moon in the space capsule, although there is free fall outside it).
This same attitude leads to critiques of Herbert's failure in forgetting to provide a source for the air on the
planet Dune. This stance is descended from Verne's own criticism of H. G. Wells as second-rate because he
"invents" science, whereas Verne represented himself as adhering to the known.
Verne's loosely-structured novels form the overwhelming majority of his influential work. Verne's
short fiction was occasional and minor, but we include this slight but charming piece to mark his place. Jules Verne,
sine qua non.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. |
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Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.