Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece

http://www.openculture.com/2020/02/jules-vernes-voyages-extraordinaires.html

by vo2maxer • 6 years ago

450 123 6 years ago

mynegation2• 6 years ago

Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island" was how I got interested in tech around the age of 6. I devoured all of his books that I could find after that and it was my introduction to geology ("Journey to the Center of the Earth"), geography ("In search of the castaways", "Around the world in eighty days"), oceanology ("Twenty thousand leagues under the sea"), Astronautics ("From the Earth to the Moon", "Around the moon"), dystopian/utopian world building ("The Begum's fortune") and so on and so forth.

EDIT: fixed the name of the book, thank you bradyd.

bradyd• 6 years ago

I believe you actually mean "The Mysterious Island". I read this book last year and was amazed by the level of technical detail.

nabla9• 6 years ago

As a kid when I learned to read I soon devoured trough books in children section basically reading all books from one author, then moving to the next.

First Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and Mars series. Then all Jules Verne books available. Verne is technically very detailed. They were great reading experiences. I can still remember where the books were placed in the library.

ZguideZ9• 6 years ago

I did the same. I got sidetracked with Tolkien and the Jim Kjelgaard Big Red books as well.

ZguideZ9• 6 years ago

It's funny, kids don't get to experience the magic of libraries like we did. I'm a 71 model and I think those that came after the 70s pretty much didn't get to experience it.

nsajko2• 6 years ago

Ditto, but I think it would be good to accompany the book with some testimonies by/about people who got hurt/killed by chemicals. I remember getting quite giddy about the possibility to get some nitroglycerin, nitric acid, etc. from reading The Mysterious Island; and I was lucky to lack the resourcefulness needed to actually obtain the nasty stuff.

If the young reader could get a good chemistry teacher as a tutor, though; the possibilities turn from grim to great.

irrational3• 6 years ago

For me it was the old Tom Swift books that I found at my grandparent's house. Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster, Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter, Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire, Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon, etc.

https://www.orderofbooks.com/characters/tom-swift/

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=tom+swift

jvanvleet• 6 years ago

Mine too. Tom Swift and the Bookmobile that brought them changed my life. It also had a few of the "new" Tom Swift adventures and I later learned there was an "old" series that start with Tom Swift and his Wireless Message and Tom Swift and his Electronic Rifle.

smacktoward• 6 years ago

Unrelated fact: Tom Swift is why tasers are called tasers. Their inventor, Jack Cover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cover), named them by acronymizing "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" (TASER).

T-hawk• 6 years ago

Wow, same here. My family happened to find a big set of that same Tom Swift series at a yard sale when I was about 12. They were constantly my most-read books through middle and high school, and may well have had something to do with going into tech as a career.

wikibob• 6 years ago

Me too! I loved those books when I was young. I'd forgotten about them.

btown• 6 years ago

The Tom Swift Jr. (First Series) books (the ones you mentioned above) were a core part of my childhood too - they inspired my father to become an engineer, and the very same books did the same for me. They're certainly a product of their time, with clearly-allegorical "Brungarian" antagonists and somewhat dated gender roles. But they were incredibly imaginative, adventurous, and clever.

Looking back, the concept that a person could love what they do so much, that they would want a "cot in the lab," probably drove me to the startup space long before that was a thing!

WalterBright6• 6 years ago

Elon Musk is the real life Tom Swift:

1. Elon Musk and his Reusable Space Rocket

2. Elon Musk and his Electric Car

3. Elon Musk and his Tunnel Boring Machine

4. Elon Musk and his Flamethrower

5. Elon Musk and his Self Driving Car

Darkphibre2• 6 years ago

For me it was Tom Swift and... Danny Dunn! Can't believe that series is so hard to track down, it's been out of print for ages.

Case in point: Danny discovers the pros and cons of invisibility, by learning how to pilot the professor's telepresence suit that drives a small insect-sized drone. This was in 1974.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn,_Invisible_Boy

mynegation2• 6 years ago

EDIT2: Basically any government that wants to improve investment into STEM should start by including those and similar books into the school reading program.

wiseleo• 6 years ago

You're right. Compare that to the random classics in which you have no interest on which you have to write a report.

pi-rat• 6 years ago

Probably my favorite book as a child, I probably read that thing 100 times.

mindcrime• 6 years ago

Same here. I've read that book probably at least 20 times in my life, and I expect I'll read it at least a couple more if I live long enough.

ZguideZ9• 6 years ago

Don't forget an introduction to Chemistry in Mysterious Island as well. Fun fact, The Mysterious Island was the basis of the series LOST.

kpozin• 6 years ago

Interesting, I haven't been able to find any acknowledged connections between the two. Do you have any references you could share?

The two works were linked in my mind back when I was watching Lost, and my impressions of them were very similar -- in both The Mysterious Island and Lost, there were fascinating mysteries built up in the beginning, but the eventually revealed explanations could not live up to those expectations.

tigershark• 6 years ago

I decided to become an engineer after reading the mysterious island. Although I was somewhat older, probably 10-12. Journey to the centre of the earth was actually the first book that I read when I was probably 7, and I really enjoyed it.

AceJohnny2• 6 years ago

Same impact of "Mysterious Island" on me. It's the original "competence/achievement" book.

Though I've never fully recovered from the reality check than a real engineer isn't as broadly competent and knowledgeable as Cyrus Smith. (even American ones ;) )

amerine• 6 years ago

Is there a collection of fictional ‘"documentational" illustrations like "the map of the Polar regions (hand-drawn by Verne himself)’ illustrations out there? I love that hand-drawn style and often want to find examples for tattoos.

durkie• 6 years ago

You're in luck! This week, via kottke.org: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/

julienchastang• 6 years ago

I read a number of Jules Vernes novels recently. The pattern is a similar one where he describes the known science of the time in quite a bit of accurate detail. Starting with that as the premise, he then runs with the idea to create the plot. The result is both science and science fiction. My favorite is still "Around the World in Eighty Days". A Jules Verne novel was rediscovered not long ago: "Paris in the Twentieth Century".

Robotbeat• 6 years ago

That really is what science fiction is supposed to be, IMHO. You take a scientific or technological concept (or set of concepts... or perhaps a near-at-hand extrapolation of a concept... like air-independent propulsion for the Nautilus) and explore it and its consequences thoroughly.

Seveneves explores social media and swarm robots (and non-fantastical alternatives-to-chemical-rocket-propulsion), for instance (and later, epigenetics).

Arrival explores a hypothesis from the science of linguistics, for instance (I like this one a lot because it strays from the usual "hard" sciences or anthropological rehashing of European conquest, etc, of space operas).

Space operas are really just fantasy in space. Fun, grand epics, but not science fiction (exception would be in The Last Jedi, the use of the hyperdrive as an extremely powerful weapon... exploring the consequences of any kind of propulsion system capable of traveling at extreme speeds... of course, everyone--except me--hated that one because, we all agree, Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction).

abnry• 6 years ago

I still get goosebumps remembering the scene in "journey to the center of the earth" when they see a human figure lumbering across the cavern.

Paris in the 20th century was also really cool to read. Almost every Jules Verne book has this unbridled optimism (especially pronounced in the American characters). But this book is dark. I kinda liked it for that. After reading so many Jules Verne books as a teenager, they all started to feel the same.

crmrc114• 6 years ago

Holy cow, Looks like I need to expand the library.. Somehow I am unable to quickly find a complete collection in print. I will have to dig to see what volumes would be required to collect all of his work. Plenty of ebook collections however if that is your style.

karatestomp• 6 years ago

Beware: AFAIK many of the most commonly-available English translations are not very good. It's a pretty common problem with 19th-century foreign language literature generally, in fact. The public domain's full of translations that are simply poor, and/or retain a lot of cruft from 19th or early 20th century English style that aren't vital to conveying the meaning or tone of the original work, and so are less approachable to the modern reader, to no real purpose. Probably any big ebook collections you find are going to be re-packagings of translations of this sort, from Project Gutenberg or wherever.

His French isn't too tough if you read that, but some of the English translations you see in the wild—oof.

mamcx• 6 years ago

Sound like a niche business opportunity?

alex_c• 6 years ago

Are there specific English translations that are good and reasonably modern?

As a kid I read Jules Verne translated in my native language, and loved it. Not sure where I would start to acquire his work in English.

James_Henry2• 6 years ago

I would love to re-read some of these books with the original illustrations now, something I didn't have the first time I read them.

Does anyone know of good copies of English translations that preserve the original illustrations? The easiest to find ones on Amazon (from SeaWolf Press) don't look to be the best printing.

rst• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, Verne was not well served by his contemporary translators -- among other things, there are technical descriptions, or episodes poking fun at the English or Americans, which somehow just never showed up in the English translations. There are newer translations that do a much better job -- but those are still within copyright, and so not cheap. (This addresses only the text; the illustrations are a significant extra wrinkle.)

James_Henry2• 6 years ago

Guess I'll have to learn French!

jacobolus2• 6 years ago

newer translations that do a much better job

Do you have recommendations?

komali24• 6 years ago

Human knowledge of the universe has widened and deepened since Verne's day, but for sheer intellectual and adventurous wonder about what that universe might contain, has any writer, from any era or land, outdone him since?

No, I don't think so. It seems sci fi went the way of the graduate thesis: hyper specialized, hyper focused. I think this might have been out of necessity. Maybe Stephenson has come close though.

He's covered nonfictional history, space travel (anathem, seven eves), colonization of Earth orbit and the moon (seven eves), generational space travel (anathem), multiple universe theories (anathem), and to come back down to earth, cryptography (cryptonomicon, reamde, fall), AI (diamond age), wetware hacking (snow crash), VR (snow crash, fall), post mortem VR (fall), nanotech (fall, diamond age), and layered simulated universes (fall).

So beyond Stephenson I don't think anyone comes close to fantastical exploration at the level of Verne. Crichton didn't. Watts is highly focused in biology. Banks deals with cosmic horror, AI, and a touch of multiverse. Doctorow is fantastic "realistic near future" exploration but he never takes us to space, and I don't think he really even explores AI.

nsajko2• 6 years ago

With names aready being dropped, here are some oldies: Clarke, Asimov, Stanislav Lem.

komali24• 6 years ago

Ah, you're right, Asimov definitely tops the list. He explored the fuck out of AI and then jumped straight into the question of whether human psychology is deterministic. Space travel, galaxy colonization, hell even telekinesis and other wild shit.

I think he doesn't have the breadth of topic of Neal Stephenson but he's definitely prolific.

Apocryphon2• 6 years ago

Why not Crichton? Too much techno-thriller horror, despite his fantastical imaginings and settings?

webmaven• 6 years ago

Ever notice that most Crichton plots end with things going back to the status quo?

komali24• 6 years ago

I haven't read all of Crichton, but from what I remember, he covered

Nanotech/grey goo

Genetic engineering

Aliens and their freaky orbs

Time travel

As far as I know, he's not really explored the possibilities of space exploration, AI, VR, transhumanism, etc. I mean he's great but I don't think he covers all that much ground.

ZguideZ9• 6 years ago

Also Heinlein explored some pretty far out things.

hatenberg• 6 years ago

Philip K Dick had a pretty broad spectrum

codeulike• 6 years ago

Banks deals with cosmic horror, AI, and a touch of multiverse.

Come on now, there's a lot more to Iain M Banks than that. Anarchist post-scarcity utopias, dirigible behemothaurs, The Shellworld Sursamen, and the mind-boggling purpose it was put to, the immenseness of Syang-un Nestworld, the idea that whole civilizations can sublime, Minds, pure energy creatures, The Girdlecity of Xown, in which a huge airship hosts a five year long two thousand person party to mark the end of a civilization. The Excession. The Affront! The subtle exploration of what people born into a galaxy spanning utopia might want to do with their time. And the fantastic and slighly disturbing idea that super intelligent Minds might give themselves silly names.

And his non-Culture novel Feersum Endjinn, although its quite old now, had some startling ideas about cyberspace - that it might move thousands of times faster than base reality, and (major spoilers - ROT13) rfpncrq znyjner zvtug ribyir va uvtu-fcrrq plorefcnpr vagb n pvivyvmngvba infgyl byqre naq zber pbzcyvpngrq guna bhe bja, naq pbzcyrgryl vapbzcerurafvoyr gb hf

codesnik• 6 years ago

Clifford Simak's books all seem to be mainly about evolution of humanity of some sorts, but they are so epic that they touch almost every usual and unusual sci-fi topic.

CWuestefeld• 6 years ago

recapturing the 'feel' of Verne’s socio-historical milieu and evoking that sense of faraway exoticism and futuristic awe

It's my understanding that the original French texts (not just the illustrations) are much richer in that socio-historical stuff. The English translations that we have are unfortunately dumbed-down to YA-friendly adventure stories.

I'd love to see translations that more faithfully capture the full complexity of the works.

Andrew_nenakhov• 6 years ago

"The Mysterious Island" is his best book, and it had aged way much better than any of his other novels. Probably because in this one Verne didn't try to venture far from the realm of possible, giving Cyrus Smith a very advanced set of skills and deep knowledge of contemporary sciences, but abstained from introducing non-existing technologies, besides a brief appearance of Nemo & "Nautilus"

abecedarius• 6 years ago

If you read French, there's a convenient Kindle edition of his collected works for three bucks. Unfortunately the illustrations there are comparable to postage stamps.

hallidave• 6 years ago

Also this, for free: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Jules_Verne

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

I did not know that, and I have read a few of his books.

One of the reasons that I like HN, is because of occasional gems like this.

Thanks!

kazinator• 6 years ago

A movie called Vynález zkázy ("the destructive contraption") based on severa of Verne's works was made in Czechoslovakia in 1958, combining animations based on line art from some of Verne's books with live acting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_World_of_Jules_Ve...

It won the Grand Prix at the International Film Festival that was held as part of Expo 58 in Brussels.

Czechs and Slovaks can't get enough Verne. Check out all the translations of The Mysterious Island between 1878 and 2018. Some of the translators did it several times again, one of them six times.

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajupln%C3%BD_ostrov#%C4%8Cesk...

paganel• 6 years ago

Jules Verne was generally seen pretty well in the former communist countries, my HN/reddit nickname is taken from a Soviet TV series based on one of Jules Verne's books [1]. Mind you, I didn't even live in the former Soviet Union, but when I first saw a glimpse of Verne's universe as a 7-year old kid I was hooked for life.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088635/

ElFitz• 6 years ago

Jules Vernes is one of my favorite authors.

He dreamt big, wild (Michel Strogoff), and daringly (From the Earth to the Moon), ranging from adventure (Around the World in Eighty Days) to scientific anticipation (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), to sheer madness (Robur the Conqueror).

My favorite quote of his is quite revealing of the man's character: "Tout ce qui est dans la limite du possible doit être et sera accompli". Which I would roughly translate as "All that is within the limits of the possible must and will be accomplished".

thrower123• 6 years ago

Reading Robur the Conqueror was quite a trip when I first picked it up from Project Gutenberg.

It made me suspect that the versions of the more well-known novels like 20,000 Leagues, Earth to the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth that I'd read from the shelves of my school library had been considerably bowdlerized.

bzbarsky2• 6 years ago

The initial English translations of Verne _were_ considerably bowdlerized, sometimes with large chunks cut out or summarized in the interests of making them more "kids books" than adult ones.

There are some modern translations that might be better on this front.

Edit: Mentioned elsewhere in this thread: <https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translati..., which I have now bookmarked!

microtherion• 6 years ago

I enjoyed many of Verne's books as a child, so last year I tried reading some to my children. I thought the writing held up quite well (compared to e.g. Karl May, another author I loved reading when I was young):

In particular, Verne is able to deploy ethnic caricatures without coming across as bigoted:

What can be added to these figures, so eloquent in themselves? Nothing. So the following calculation obtained by the statistician Pitcairn will be admitted without contestation: by dividing the number of victims fallen under the projectiles by that of the members of the Gun Club, he found that each one of them had killed, on his own account, an average of two thousand three hundred and seventy-five men and a fraction.
By considering such a result it will be seen that the single preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity philanthropically, and the perfecting of firearms considered as instruments of civilisation. It was a company of Exterminating Angels, at bottom the best fellows in the world.

bouvin• 6 years ago

I agree in general (adored Verne as child, and has enjoyed many of his books as an adult), but I would caution against reading Off on a Comet, as that contains pure, unadulterated, mean-spirited anti-semitism. At least that does not come to the fore in any other book of his that I have read.

f4stjack• 6 years ago

Oh man, I recently finished some of his novels and it is astounding to see the optimism he had for us, considering he was writing in a world before any world wars happened.

I really would like to live in a Vernian world where people are mostly good and rationalism wins the day. But I also would like to live in Discworld (maybe except Fourecks) so caveat emptor! :'D

erk__• 6 years ago

You should try and read the dystopian novel he wrote, it was first published in 1994. It paints a very bleak dystopian picture of Paris, it is an interesting contrast to his other works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century

acabal• 6 years ago

Shameless plug, we have a few Verne books downloadable for free as high-quality ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne/

If you'd like to produce some new ones for everyone to read, get in touch at our mailing list!

nathell• 6 years ago

Ah, Verne. Brings back childhood memories.

I consumed the entire Verne that was in my primary school library, maybe 15 novels in total. "The Mysterious Island" and "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" were one of the first books I read in English translations (my mother tongue is Polish), around the age of 13. Good times.

8bitsrule• 6 years ago

This story of the (usually serialized first) books' publishing history is interesting. (Many also had special 'Christmas editions'.)

"... if variations in binding color are considered, more than 4000 different combinations of text and binding were published between 1866 and 1919."

http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_1/harpold/

ZguideZ9• 6 years ago

I love this. I ate these up as a kid and looked for the connections.

esch89• 6 years ago

That's amazing!

mirimir3• 6 years ago

All here for free: https://www.epubbooks.com/series/1-voyages-extraordinaires

Registration required, though.

misterprime• 6 years ago

And here without registration requirements: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/60

mirimir3• 6 years ago

Gutenberg blocks German IPs.

kwhitefoot2• 6 years ago

User: bugmenot@mailinator.com

Password: bugmenot

I downloaded Five Weeks in a Balloon and noticed that it does not credit a translator but does claim copyright. Seems a bit odd.

shakna• 6 years ago

Well, there's a number of people plugging their ebook sites of some of them easier to get books.

As a slightly different plug, "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" from 1916 [0] is worth a glance.

It's a silent film, so some people might not be able to watch it today, but is has some curiosities to it.

It was the first feature filmed underwater, using a simple tube and mirror arrangement that most people here could come up with. It also had tons of extravagant sets, and so on, making it incredibly expensive for the era.

Literature wise, it combines "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" and "The Mysterious Island", in a fairly faithful way.

[0] https://sixteenmm.org/s/leaguesunderthesea_1916

Note: If it wasn't obvious from above, that's a link to something I run.

JoeDaDude• 6 years ago

In Prophets of Science Fiction [1], the TV Series about SF authors, they portrayed Jules Verne as disillusioned and depressed in his later years. They said he burned all his correspondence and in despair wrote his last work, Paris in the Twentieth Century [2], a somewhat dystopian novel in which art is no longer valued.

It is such a contrast to his other novels I have to wonder how accurate this portrayal is, whether it was greatly exaggerated in some way. Can anyone comment on Verne's latter days?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_of_Science_Fiction [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century

quotemstr• 6 years ago

It's amazingly difficult to predict which of one's efforts is going to "stick". I've put years of work into things that ended up being total duds. I've also spent a few evenings here and there writing things off-the-cuff that ended up becoming famous. Just as we're lucky if we think one truly novel thought in all our lives, we're amazingly lucky if one part of our effort out of 54 becomes part of humanity's collective inheritance. Jules Verne was lucky several times over.

giorgioz• 6 years ago

Human knowledge of the universe has widened and deepened since Verne's day, but for sheer intellectual and adventurous wonder about what that universe might contain, has any writer, from any era or land, outdone him since?

Yes, we can safely say science fiction writers after Jules Verne has outdone him. Safely. I believe Jules Verne himself reading science fiction that came after himself would say so himself.

Believing that one moment in the past was better than all the future moments is a classic form of romantic nostalgia in the style of Midnight in Paris of Woody Allen.

I believe Jules Verne books were incredibile for the time and inspired millions of readers.

Believing that Jules Verne was the apex though is very sad. It's absolutely the opposite of what Jules Verne was. Jules Verne was a dreamer believing in progress. When you believe that the Jules Verne was the apex of science fiction progress you are spitting in the face of his optimism.

nicodds• 6 years ago

Almost like Donald Knuth's TAOCP!

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece

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