Where It's More Science than Fiction

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is not a very good book. In fact, I would argue it's not really a novel.

Not because it's short. It is a little short, but it's longer than many pulp novels.

It's that it doesn't contain many of the attributes of a novel. The characters are almost dispensed with for about half of the book--we are instead given calculations and science as if it's textbook.

[skim or skip, by all means]:

But, in order that the moon should reach the zenith of a given place, it is necessary that the place should not exceed in latitude the declination of the luminary; in other words, it must be comprised within the degrees 0º and 28° of lat. N. or S. In every other spot the fire must necessarily be oblique, which would seriously militate against the success of the experiment.

As to the sixth question, "What place will the moon occupy in the heavens at the moment of the projectile's departure?"
Answer.— At the moment when the projectile shall be discharged into space, the moon, which travels daily forward 13° 10' 35", will be distant from the zenith point by four times that quantity, i.e. by 52° 41' 20", a space which corresponds to the path which she will describe during the entire journey of the projectile. But, inasmuch as it is equally necessary to take into account the deviation which the rotary motion of the earth will impart to the shot, and as the shot cannot reach the moon until after a deviation equal to 16 radii of the earth, which, calculated upon the moon's orbit, are equal to...

There are pages and pages like this, describing the motion of the moon, the stresses put on the cannon, the type of gunpowder needed to create a certain kind of explosion, the kind of explosion necessary to move an object of a particular size, the size necessary to make it big enough to see it with a telescope, and the kind of telescope that would needed to do the job... and so on. The text fetishizes numbers and calculations, reveling in them, as if inundating the reader with math and jargon would make us forget how foolish it all is. That's fine. But he forgot a plot. Really, the plot is just planning it and building it and firing it, and much of that happens in a remote way, by unseen hands, and there's virtually no tension or interest anywhere.

The characters are rudimentary and given almost nothing to do except narrate like professors. (There's a tiny bit of personal conflict between the MC and his rival, but that fizzles.) The story reads more like a documentary, or maybe an HGTV renovation show, where it just shows how a job gets done. Except those shows have more humanity in them than this book.

The conflict--"we must build a giant cannon to shoot something to the moon"--is a legitimate conflict, potentially, but it's not given to humans to solve; it's given to physics. The only real obstacle was solving for x. There was a tiny bit of fundraising, but it also amounted to nothing.

Really, this book is what you get when a documentary and a physics textbook love each other very, very much.

And no conclusion, really. The cannon is shot, so you can claim it as a sort of climax, but we know nothing of the three men inside the projectile. Do they survive the initial firing? Does their science work well enough to provide air while they're in there? Do they fight? Are they scared? If he had told the story from their perspective, it would be a lot closer to a novel. Instead, like the crowd gathered to watch the projectile launched into space, we see it fired from the cannon and then... we just wander off, none too sure what, if anything, has been accomplished.

This could have been a very cool short story, and still could be, if we chopped about 80% of it.

Anyway, I didn't hate it, despite my rant. It was interesting as an example of the origins of science fiction. He was aiming for hard science, like Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke, Liu Cixin or Andy Weir, and it needed to start somewhere. It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, the way that book also focused on specific, tiny, scientific details--building a home with poor tools, husbanding crops, solving all the problems of survival alone on a desert island--and the through-line from Robinson Crusoe to this to The Martian is pretty clear. I found it worth reading even if just for those insights.

Not much recommended. But who knows? You might like it.

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Where Verne Poses Lots of Moral Questions and Tells a Fun Story

The Blockade Runners by Jules Verne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an entertaining and enlightening short work. I liked it.

At about 20,000 words, you can consider this as either a long novelette or a short novella. Either way, it's a nice length for the story it told, IMO, though I could easily see this fleshed out into a novel of 80K-100K without harm. It would also make a good movie without changing a thing. Maybe there's already a movie. I dunno.

Written in 1865 and set just a few years earlier, taking place in the middle part of the American Civil War, this opens my eyes a little to the way Europe could have been viewing the conflict and how it affected their lives. From a Scottish viewpoint, the war disrupted trade, making it very difficult to get enough cotton to keep the mills in operation. Naturally, that puts businessmen (the ones not too interested in the morality of the question) on the side of the South. It was strange but informative to see sympathetic characters, people who are apparently decent people in other ways, siding with slavers and finding arguments to be blame the North (here called the Federals) to the point that they considered them in the wrong. That really struck me, even though I know I'd been taught this in history class. Something about fiction gets through, you know? It made me realize that the mills in England and Scotland had been a part of the slavery business from the start. A lot of people's wealth depended on the exploitation of enslaved people.

(Crimes have a way of spreading, don't they? Especially big ones. They start compromising everyone connected in any way. That extends to the lawyers and the bankers and the politicians as well, not just the businessmen. Hmmmm.)

It's horrifying as well instructive to see how easy it is for people to deny the humanity of others, especially if it's in their own economic self-interest. What makes the lesson so useful to me is realizing that this was written during the events of the war, in real time, while it was affecting Americans one way and Europeans in another. Hearing the debates and being privy to the thinking of people in 1865 means a lot more than reading a modern account of what people thought back then.

I was happy to see the main character, James Playfair, get turned around a bit when he takes the side of a young woman whose father, a journalist and fervent abolitionist, was being held captive by the South. His mission to run the blockade and trade weapons for raw cotton gets amended to include rescuing her dad. If they can do that, they have to get past the blockade again, but this time they'll be fired on by both sides. But their new steam engines are the fastest on the ocean...

So--a good story, good action, good characters, with an interesting treatment of a big moral question. I found 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea super dull, and I had expected to like it. Around the World in 80 Days was the opposite--I really liked it, and thought I wouldn't. I didn't have any idea about this, but enjoyed it. The takeaway is that I'm finding Verne's action stories more fun than his science fiction. But we'll test this theory when I read From the Earth to the Moon. Hope it's good; let's find out.

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Where It's Not Science Fiction, but It's Fun

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was surprisingly entertaining.

I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea a while ago, and I didn't really like it. I thought that was the one I was most likely to enjoy. I had the opposite expectation for this one, and yet it turned out to be pretty fun. I thought there was supposed to be some old-fashioned science fiction elements in it, and there were none, but it worked fine as an adventure novel.

There are some serious flaws in the work, including racist and Eurocentric views that can't be glossed over, so this book wouldn't do well, say, in a modern classroom. Unless you wanted to look specifically at those topics, I suppose. But these flaws are not unexpected. (The anti-American language and bias was a little unexpected, but I kinda laughed at it. Between Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jules Verne, one can see that Europeans have been maligning Americans as fools and thugs for a long time.)

Otherwise, the novel is successful, IMO. It's engaging and well paced with characters I was interested in. There's also something exciting about the world at that time--bigger and less thoroughly understood with more adventures possible than now. Steamboats and trains are in a nice groove between horses and sailing ships on one hand and cars and jets on the other. I love that Indiana Jones adventure vibe.

Anyway, it gives me hope that I may enjoy the other stories waiting for me in this omnibus edition, eventually. We'll see.

Recommended, with caveats regarding 19th century colonial attitudes.

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The French OG of Science Fiction. Not too bad, all in all

20000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This will not be everyone's cup of tea, but I rather enjoyed it.

In most ways, it's a slower and smaller novel than I expected. My only experience with it is cultural references and a vague memory of a Disney (I think?) version that I saw as a kid. It is an adventure novel to some extent, but it is much more a book of wonders.

Some of Lovecraft's work is like this; traveling to Antarctica to find amazing ruins, following the protagonists as they explore the site, while experiencing very little plot development is a lot like this novel. We see amazing things under the sea, like tourists, and don't ask for a lot of plot. (Some Elizabethan theater is like this, IMO--Marlowe's Tamburlaine has a thin plot but is full of spectacle and action; Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay shows the audience magical marvels just for the fun of it; and many other plays of the time seem to focus on what would just be fun to see without so much concern for plots and subplots.) So--that's cool, then. It's one station along the development of science fiction. "Imagine being in this very strange place." Then you show it to an audience or describe it for your readers and it's like a little trip.

It's just our generation that want's more story in it. I mean, there is some, of course; there are conflicts and subplots. But really, the star is what's going on around them under the water.

It's not that long ago I finally read Dracula and had the same sense of closure after finishing it, the same sensation of, "Oh, I see, that's how it goes." It's a pleasure to come at the original at last and know it for myself instead of through cultural intermediaries.

Also, the anti-colonial theme was interesting. I didn't realize that was there. Seems a little ahead of its time.

So--a bit slow and not terribly exciting, so probably not fun for many readers. But I liked it. :)

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