| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"johac" |
| Date: |
22 Mar 2005 07:53:47 AM |
| Object: |
Prescient Jules Verne remembered |
Thursday, March 24 is the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne's death. He
was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up. I didn't realize
that English translations of his works were censored. I'll have to read
the newer versions.
---
Prescient Jules Verne remembered
SUNDAY PUNCH
By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
For AP Weekly Features
Jules Verne
A century after his death, novelist Jules Verne, who imagined moon
flight and deep-sea voyages, looks more prophetic than ever.
Verne, the French science-fiction pioneer who died 100 years ago this
March, is the second-most-translated author on earth, after Agatha
Christie. His 1864 novel "Journey" remains one of the liveliest
introductions to earth science, fossil biology and evolution in
literature. And it's one of the earliest: It appeared just five years
after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species."
Best-known for "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and "Around the World in
80 Days," Verne has always been a major cultural figure in his native
land. Now Verne enthusiasts are pushing for a reconsideration of the
writer as an influential literary figure whose 64 novels and stories
offer not only startling prophecies, but also sharp commentary on the
Europe and America of his day.
"There's a Jules Verne renaissance going on, and it's building," Arthur
Evans, a professor of modern languages at DePauw University in Indiana
tells Smithsonian magazine for the March issue. Backed by scholarly
articles and new translations of Verne's work, Evans and other
revisionists argue that Verne's writings are more complex, more
skeptical and more politically charged than is commonly supposed.
Most English-language editions of Verne's novels are public-domain texts
more than a century old. Victorian translators removed references to
Darwin, politics, the ills of British imperialism -- and much of Verne's
humor. Entire chapters were literally lost in translation.
"For the first time," says Evans, "people in the English-speaking world
are seeing what Verne actually wrote, as opposed to the bowdlerized hack
translations that have been available previously."
A milestone in the re-evaluation of Verne came in 1989, when his
great-grandson Jean Verne had the door of a rusting family safe blasted
open. Inside he found a small yellowed manuscript containing Verne's
unpublished third novel, written in 1863. It's no uplifting tale of
technological derring-do but a bleak melodrama of Paris circa 1960.
Published in 1994 as "Paris in the 20th Century," the work is not great
literature -- one critic called its plot "rudimentary."
The novel had languished for 131 years because of Verne's editor and
publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. "No one today would believe your
prophecies," he wrote his chastened young author in rejecting the
manuscript.
With few exceptions, Verne never again indulged in open-ended imaginings
of a distant future. "Virtually all his books are placed in the present
or the immediate past," Evans says. "There are no ray guns or bug-eyed
monsters. He wrote Industrial Age adventure stories."
Under Hetzel's tutelage, Verne hit on the narrative formula he would
follow for 40 years: a breathless adventure based on a scientific or
geographic topic then making headlines. His first novel, "Five Weeks in
a Balloon," a best seller about an aerial expedition across Africa,
appeared in 1863, when real-life explorers David Livingstone and John
Hanning Speke were bushwhacking through the heart of that continent.
"Around the World in 80 Days" was published in 1872, within three years
of the completion of transcontinental railroads in the United States and
India and the opening of the Suez Canal.
Verne's most popular novels, written in the 1860s and '70s, seem to be
upbeat paeans to scientific progress. Science-fiction fans generally
recall "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865) and its sequel, "Around the
Moon" (1870), as a prophetic adventure. In the saga, a three-man
aluminum capsule lifts off from central Florida, orbits the moon, then
returns to Earth by splashing down in the Pacific -- a perfect dry run
for Apollo 8 a century later.
Not long before his death from diabetes at age 77, Verne expressed
little interest in automobiles, yet he predicted that the car would
prompt an exodus of wealthy urbanites to the countryside.
To call Jules Verne merely the father of science fiction somehow doesn't
do him justice.
---
http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/2005/03/20/living.20050320-sbt-MI
CH-F2-Prescient_Jules_Vern.sto
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense,
founded on the Christian religion..."
Joel Barlow, Treaty of Tripoli (1796)
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| User: "Harry F. Leopold" |
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| Title: Re: Prescient Jules Verne remembered |
22 Mar 2005 10:39:54 AM |
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On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 01:53:47 -0600, johac wrote
(in article <jhachm-7F619E.23534621032005@news.giganews.com>):
Thursday, March 24 is the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne's death. He was
one of my favorite authors when I was growing up. I didn't realize that
English translations of his works were censored. I'll have to read the newer
versions.
Snip of excellent article.
I agree, I will also have to get my hands on any new translations of Jules
books. If the new translations are as good, and it sounds as if they should
be even better, than the stories I read years ago, it would certainly be the
best time to renew my friendship with an old, long-gone, friend.
--
Harry F. Leopold
aa #2076
AA/Vet #4
The Prints of Darkness
(remove gene to email)
³Telling teens to forget sex always reminds me of the story of King Canute
ordering the tide not to come in. And about as effective.³-johac
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| User: "Glenn Arnold" |
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| Title: Re: Prescient Jules Verne remembered |
22 Mar 2005 09:10:35 PM |
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johac wrote:
Thursday, March 24 is the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne's death. He
was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up. I didn't realize
that English translations of his works were censored. I'll have to read
the newer versions.
---
Prescient Jules Verne remembered
SUNDAY PUNCH
By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
For AP Weekly Features
Jules Verne
<snip>
Verne's most popular novels, written in the 1860s and '70s, seem to be
upbeat paeans to scientific progress. Science-fiction fans generally
recall "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865) and its sequel, "Around the
Moon" (1870), as a prophetic adventure. In the saga, a three-man
aluminum capsule lifts off from central Florida, orbits the moon, then
returns to Earth by splashing down in the Pacific -- a perfect dry run
for Apollo 8 a century later.
Not from what I remember.
I don't think the capsule was aluminum, and as I recall, the capsule
went into orbit around the Moon by accident, because no one had
accounted for the gravity of the "other satellite" they they discovered
by flying past it. The book ended with the knowledge that the capsule
would remain in orbit around the Moon forever, unless my memory is
really off.
Glenn Arnold
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: Prescient Jules Verne remembered |
23 Mar 2005 06:54:00 AM |
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In article <424089CB.6090809@att.net>, Glenn Arnold <oldnoah@att.net>
wrote:
johac wrote:
Thursday, March 24 is the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne's death. He
was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up. I didn't realize
that English translations of his works were censored. I'll have to read
the newer versions.
---
Prescient Jules Verne remembered
SUNDAY PUNCH
By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
For AP Weekly Features
Jules Verne
<snip>
Verne's most popular novels, written in the 1860s and '70s, seem to be
upbeat paeans to scientific progress. Science-fiction fans generally
recall "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865) and its sequel, "Around the
Moon" (1870), as a prophetic adventure. In the saga, a three-man
aluminum capsule lifts off from central Florida, orbits the moon, then
returns to Earth by splashing down in the Pacific -- a perfect dry run
for Apollo 8 a century later.
Not from what I remember.
I don't think the capsule was aluminum, and as I recall, the capsule
went into orbit around the Moon by accident, because no one had
accounted for the gravity of the "other satellite" they they discovered
by flying past it. The book ended with the knowledge that the capsule
would remain in orbit around the Moon forever, unless my memory is
really off.
I didn't read "Around the Moon" but even the first work, "From the Earth
to the Moon", was pretty prophetic considering when he wrote it.
Glenn Arnold
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense,
founded on the Christian religion..."
Joel Barlow, Treaty of Tripoli (1796)
.
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