Jules Verne

In the summer of 1839, at age 11, Jules Verne ran away from home and signed on as cabin boy aboard a three-masted schooner bound for the Indies. This escapade was brought to a hasty conclusion by his father, who quickly found his son, reprimanded him, and brought him home. Verne’s love of adventure was not to be so easily contained. It flourished, along with his 40-year writing career, in more than 65 novels that have brought readers to all seven continents, to the North and South Poles, across or under all the oceans, to the center of the earth, and to the moon. Verne’s entertaining mix of fiction and scientific verisimilitude made him one of the most popular and financially successful writers of the Victorian era. But in his time and today, this popularity has not been accompanied by critical acclaim; he has often been dismissed as a less-than-serious, if talented, writer of tall tales for children. In the 1990s there also arises the question of relevance. With the scientific wonders of Verne’s novels now realized, surpassed, or proven impractical, what hold could he have on the imagination of the contemporary reader? While the U.S. Navy’s Seawolf may outstrip Verne’s Nautilus in terms of speed, power, and stealth, the Nautilus bests its modern-day counterpart in terms of charm, grandeur, and capacity to stir the imagination. Hidden deep beneath the sea, it is the perfect retreat from a taxing, threatening world, replete with good food, good books, and good music. Captain Nemo, the dark, memorable anti-hero of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, anticipates contemporary concerns about human damage to the environment; his passionate love and defense of the sea and its creatures renders him a forerunner of Jacques Cousteau. In numerous novels Verne asks how human interference can be reconciled with nature, what moral implications there will be for the advance of civilization. The reasons most readers turn to Verne, however, reside in his twists and turns of