 I
thought I knew about Jules Verne – but there's a side
of him that, to my chagrin, I've only recently discovered.
Jules
Verne … the man who predicted computers, calculators
and a world-wide communications network more than a century
before Internet and the world-wide web.
Probably
some of you are nodding, pitying the poor columnist who's
only now discovered Verne's Paris
in the Twentieth Century – which was, after
all, published in 1994. Only 130 years – give or take
a few months – after Verne wrote the book, and 89 years
after his death.
Born
on Feb. 8, 1828, Verne shares credit with H.G. Wells and Hugo
Gernsback as one of the three “Fathers of Science Fiction,”
but he was the first. Among his best-known books are A
Journey to the Center of the Earth, published in
1864, Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, and Around
the World in Eighty Days in 1873.
The phrase
“science fiction” hadn't yet been coined for the
genre when Verne started writing. His public knew him as the
author of books of exploration and adventure – starting
with Five
Weeks in a Balloon, published in 1863 and subtitled
“Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen.”
 It
was in 1863 that Verne completed another manuscript –
and subsequently showed to his publisher: a tale of a young
man, 16-year-old Michel Dufrenoy, a poet born in a twentieth
century world (1960, in Verne novel) where poets – and
literature – are no longer valued. Only business and
technology are important.
The book
is bleak. The young protagonist, unable to cope in a sterile
world where the only books are about technology, eventually
collapses and dies after unconsciously circling a cemetery
in a fit of delirium. Verne's publisher, Pierre Jules Hetzel,
persuaded the author to set the manuscript aside for fear
its dystopian pessimism would harm Verne's career.
Verne
reportedly put the manuscript in a safe. Hetzel had told him
to put it away for 20 years. In fact, the manuscript didn't
surface again until 1989, when it was found by Verne's great-grandson.
In the
meantime, Verne's reputation was assured by publication of
such books as From
the Earth to the Moon (1865), The
Mysterious Island (1874), Master
of the World (1904) and a number of works published
after his death in 1905, including The
Lighthouse at the End of the World.
No other
of Verne's works hold the predictive power of Paris.
Michel Dufrenoy lives in a world of glass skyscrapers …
gasoline-powered automobiles … high-speed trains …
computers. Criminals are executed by means of “electric
charge.” People communicate via a world-wide “telegraphic”
network.
Science
fiction can influence society. It fires the imagination of
those who read it – or who watch SF films and television
shows. It prompts questions: Can vehicles indeed be made to
run on gasoline? What are computers, and are they possible?
Those people often become the scientists and technicians who
answer such questions.
Hetzel
died in 1887, and his son took over the publishing business.
Verne died, in Amiens, on March 24, 1905, either having forgotten
his Paris manuscript or no longer seeking its publication.
It's
interesting to speculate on what society might be today if
Hetzel had chosen to publish Verne's book in 1863. |
