Making Science Fiction
SUTHERLAND, JOHN
Making Science Fiction The unmysterious future, according to Jules Verne. BY JOHN SUTHERLAND Asked to name the first parents—the Adams and the Eves—of science fiction, most literary chroniclers...
...As Brian Aldiss reminds us in his history of science fiction, The Trillion Year Spree, the genre is most often pro-dromic rather than prophetic...
...When the young French author pitched a proposal to his publisher, Pierre Jules-Hetzel, called Paris in the Twentieth Century, the hardheaded book man turned it down as preposterous...
...From the first, Verne calls his band of Americans "colonizers...
...But Verne's version is distinctively different from its predecessors: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson, Mar-ryat's Masterman Ready, or Ballantyne's The Coral Island (different, too, from its successors: Hughes's High Wind in Jamaica, Golding's Lord of the Flies, and the movie Castaway...
...There is a last-chapter revelation—something for which we readers have been made to wait hundreds of pages...
...The narrative begins with the necessary action hook and a barrage of exclamation marks: "Are we rising...
...Still, taken altogeth-er—in its new translation, handsome livery, and with its reader-friendly appa-ratus—this is a book to recommend...
...is evidently steeped, although he makes rather hard work of the title: "Mysterious" is not connected with late-nineteenth-century detective fiction but an echo of Eugène Sue's runaway bestseller of the 1840s, The Mysteries of Paris...
...Let me just say that you should refresh your acquaintance with Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea before reading The Mysterious Island...
...Science fiction's record for prophecy of the shape of things to come is lamentable...
...They erect windmills and construct electric dynamos (telegraphy arrives in a few months...
...That's the last sack emptied...
...Equally conventionally, the narrative ends with apocalypse, a volcanic eruption...
...Who is their savior...
...They smelt iron and forge steel...
...We're over the ocean...
...Carr writes lovingly about Verne, in whose work he John Sutherland is Lord Northclife Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London...
...Verne's republican sympathies are shot through with the incorrigible prejudices of his age...
...In fact, the five occupants of the balloon (a mixed crew of men, including a black former slave, Neb) are over an island in the Pacific, and a Robinsoniad ensues...
...The wholly masculine dramatis personae, for example...
...Wells called "scientific romance...
...The heroic five, under their engineer leader, Cyrus Smith, name their new home with some pomp...
...Quite the reverse...
...Verne's book was initially serialized and he ends the installment with what English serialists like Wilkie Collins (motto: make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait) called a curtain line: "The date was March 30th, 1865...
...Let us give it the name of a great citizen, my friends," Cyrus declares, "a man now engaged in a fight for the unity of the American republic...
...Five Americans— opponents of the Confederacy trapped in Richmond, which is ringed by the forces of General Ulysses Grant—make an escape by balloon...
...I think I hear waves crashing...
...BY JOHN SUTHERLAND Asked to name the first parents—the Adams and the Eves—of science fiction, most literary chroniclers come up with five names: Mary Shelley (for Frankenstein), Edward Bulwer-Lyt-ton (for The Coming Race), Edgar Allan Poe (who can claim to have invented all genres), Jules Verne, and H.G...
...They could not have known that sixteen days later a terrible crime would be committed in Washington, and that Abraham Lincoln would be felled on Good Friday by a fanatic's bullet...
...The Mysterious Island is put forward as Verne's chef d'oeuvre...
...Is the balloon climbing now...
...Much, too much, of the narrative is taken up with the colonists' civilizing and technological ingenuity...
...In various emergencies, a mysterious and omnipotent hand has intervened—saving the colonizers from death and destruction...
...The Mysterious Island allegorizes French nationalist resentment at the military humiliation visited on their country and the firm belief that, as in America, the forces of virtue would eventually prevail...
...Wells...
...Drop some ballast...
...The volume's introducer, Caleb Carr, is a writer who, in his own fiction, has profitably hybridized American historical settings of the Gilded Age with what H.G...
...But, instead of reaching the Union forces, they are carried by storm winds far into the Pacific...
...Was ever an adventure story opened with more brio...
...There are (conveniently) no natives on the island and thus no problem of relations with the subaltern colonized...
...For the love of God...
...In fact, they recreate Western civilization in this godforsaken corner of the world—so easily, The Heart of Lightness, one might call it...
...The depiction of the former slave, Neb, is obnoxious, particularly a scene in which he fears his master—as he insists on calling him—is about to replace him as manservant with a trained orangutan...
...Let us call it Lincoln Island...
...Nineteen Eighty-Four, that is, tells us more about the 1948 in which George Orwell wrote his dystopia than the 1984 in which he set his tale...
...Some aspects of this book have not lasted well...
...In the two years that they are on the island, the colonists easily do the Promethean trick (not by rubbing sticks together, but by making phosphorus matches...
...It would be wrong to spoil the story (although, to his shame, Caleb Carr does just that in his introduction...
...It is certainly substantial, and the new translation has the virtue of the very best Englishing— one does not notice it...
...Although in the middle sections I would recommend turning over three pages at a time...
...Published in 1875, The Mysterious Island opens in March 1865...
...Verne, a man of his time, was preoccupied with two great recent historical events: the American Civil War (of whose republican outcome he heartily, as a liberal Frenchman, approved) and the Prussian siege and occupation of Paris in 1870 (of which, as a patriotic Frenchman, he mightily disapproved...
...According to Caleb Carr in his introduction to Jordan Stump's new translation of Verne's The Mysterious Island, "Set in the 1960s, the book described a city consumed by runaway materialism and shrouded in pollution caused by automobile fumes, a city where people commonly possessed such luxuries as photo-telephonic facsimile machines but forsook even basic cultural knowledge...
...In the climax, Verne falls back on the Robinsoni-ad's standby device of pirates...
...We're sinking...
...But of the founding quintet, Verne was the most clairvoyant...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 30
