| Jules Verne | |
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 Photograph by Nadar, c.1878 |
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| Born | Jules Gabriel Verne February 8, 1828 Nantes, France |
| Died | March 24, 1905 (aged 77) Amiens, France |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | French |
| Period | 1850–1905 |
| Genres | Science fiction |
| Notable work(s) | |
| Spouse(s) | Honorine Hebe du Fraysse de Viane (Morel) Verne |
| Children | Michel Verne and step-daughters Valentine and Suzanne Morel |
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| French literature |
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| French literary history |
| French writers |
| Portals |
Jules Gabriel Verne (French pronunciation: [ʒyl vɛʁn]) (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.
Born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, Verne was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a children's author or a writer of genre fiction, not least because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.
Verne is the second most translated author in the world (following Agatha Christie), and his works appear in more translations per year than those of any other writer. Verne is one writer sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction," as are H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.
Jules Verne was born on 8 February 1828 on Île Feydeau, a small island within the town of Nantes, in No. 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Sophie Marie Adelaïde-Julienne Allotte de la Fuÿe. His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent. In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred meters away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anna, Mathilde, and Marie, would follow (in 1836, 1839, and 1842, respectively).
In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Mme Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some thirty years before. Mme Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise. The theme of the Robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, including The Mysterious Island, Second Fatherland, and The School for Robinsons.
In 1836, Verne went on to the École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing. In the same year, 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire River. In his brief memoir "Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse" ("Souvenirs of Childhood and Youth," 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it. He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels (The Will of an Eccentric and Robur the Conqueror respectively).
Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie, with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The ship was due to set out for the Indies that evening, but stopped first at Paimboeuf, where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel "only in his imagination." It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident.
In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie, was born in 1842. In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student. His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive, describes the seminary in humorous and disparaging terms. From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau in Nantes). After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and received the grade "Fairly good" on 29 July 1846.
By 1847, when Verne was nineteen, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion. However, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.
In 1847 Verne was sent to Paris by his father, primarily to begin his studies in law school, but also (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from Nantes. His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27 April 1847 to Émile Dezaunay, a man of forty, with whom she would have five children. Verne's frustration was such that six years later, in a letter to his mother answering a request to visit the Dezaunays in Paris, he spoke sardonically of Caroline's new life and described her as "a little less pregnant than usual."
After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, he returned to Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year (provincial law students were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams). It was at this time that he met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some thirty poems to the young woman, including "La Fille de l'air" ("The Daughter of Air"), which describes her as "blonde and enchanting / winged and transparent." His passion seems to have reciprocal, at least for a short time, but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner ten years her senior, on 19 July 1848.
The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery ("The bride was dressed in white, graceful symbol of the earnest soul of her fiancé; the bridegroom was dressed in black, mystical allusion to the color of the soul of his fiancée!"). This requited but aborted love affair seems to have permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will (Gérande in "Master Zacharius," Sava in Mathias Sandorf, Ellen in A Floating City, etc.), to such an extent that the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a "Herminie complex." The incident also led Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem "La sixième ville de France" ("The Sixth City of France").
In July 1848, Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. He obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which he shared with Édouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin. (The 1847 Paris stay had been made at 2 Rue Thérèse, the house of Verne's aunt Charuel, on the Butte Saint-Roch.)
Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848. In February, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and had fled; on 24 February a provisory government, the French Second Republic, was established, but political demonstrations continued and social tension remained. In June, barricades were erected in Paris, and the government sent Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to crush the insurrection. Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851, in which Bonaparte was crowned ruler of the Second French Empire. In a letter to his family, Verne described the bombarded state of the city after the recent June Days Uprising, but assured them that the anniversary of Bastille Day had gone by without any significant conflict.
Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and he particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother. While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theatre, writing numerous plays. Verne later recalled: "I was greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, indeed, very excited by reading and re-reading his works. At that time I could have recited by heart whole pages of Notre Dame de Paris, but it was his dramatic work that most influenced me." Another source of creative stimulation came from a neighbor: living on the same floor in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie apartment house was a young composer, Aristide Hignard, with whom Verne soon became good friends, writing several texts for Hignard to set as chansons.
During this period, Verne's letters to his parents were primarily concerned with expenses and with a suddenly appearing series of violent stomach cramps, the first of many he would suffer from during his life. Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis; in any case, his illness seems to have been a hereditary one from his mother's side.
These medical concerns were exacerbated by a rumored outbreak of cholera in March 1849. Yet another health problem would strike in 1851, when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life.
In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French military, but was spared by the sortition process, to his own great relief. He wrote to his father: "You should already know, dear papa, what I think of the military life, and of these domestic servants in livery. … You have to abandon all dignity to perform such functions." Verne's strong antiwar sentiments, to the dismay of his father, would remain steadfast throughout his life.
Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, Verne kept seriously to his law studies, and graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851.
Thanks to his visits to salons, Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny. He became close friends with Dumas's son, Alexandre Dumas, fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws). The two young men revised the play together and Dumas, through arrangements with his father, had it produced by the Opéra-National at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on 12 June 1850.
In 1851, Verne met up with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier (known as "Pitre-Chevalier"), the editor-in-chief of the magazine Musée des familles (The Family Museum). Verne offered him a short historical adventure story, "The First Ships of the Mexican Navy," written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him. Pitre-Chevalier published it, and in the same year also accepted a second short story, "A Voyage in a Balloon." The latter story, with its combination of adventurous narrative, travel themes, and detailed historical research, would later be described by Verne as "the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow."
Dumas fils put Verne in contact with Jules Seveste, a stage director who had taken over the directorship of the Théâtre-Historique, changing its name to the Théâtre Lyrique. Seveste offered Verne the job of secretary of the theatre, with little or no salary attached. Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carré. To celebrate his employment at the Théâtre Lyrique, Verne joined with ten friends to found a bachelors' dining club, the Onze-sans-femme (Eleven Bachelors).
For some time, Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer, with Verne arguing in his letters that he could only find success in literature. The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852, when his father offered Verne his own Nantes law practice. Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing "Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day."
Meanwhile, Verne was spending much time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography. It was in this period that Verne met the illustrious geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who continued to travel extensively despite his blindness (he had lost his sight completely in 1837). The two men became good friends, and Arago's innovative and witty accounts of his travels led Verne toward a newly developing genre of literature: that of travel writing.
In 1852, two new pieces from Verne appeared in the Musée des familles: "Martin Paz," a novella set in Lima, and Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss), a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres. In April and May 1854, the magazine published Verne's short story "Master Zacharius," an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy featuring a sharp condemnation of scientific hubris and ambition, followed soon after by "A Winter Amid the Ice," a polar adventure story whose themes closely anticipated many of Verne's novels.
At the end of 1854, another outbreak of cholera led to the death of Jules Seveste, Verne's employer at the Théâtre Lyrique and by then a good friend. Though his contract only held him to a further year of service, Verne remained connected to the theatre for several years after Seveste's death, seeing additional productions to fruition.
In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimée du Fraysse de Viane. Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, making friends with the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow of twenty-six with two young children. Hoping to find a secure source of income, as well as a chance to court Morel in earnest, he jumped at her brother's offer to go into business with a brokerage. Verne's father was initially dubious, but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856. With his financial situation finally looking promising, Verne won the favor of Morel and her family, and the couple were married on 10 January 1857.
Verne plunged into his new business obligations, going daily to the Paris Bourse and becoming the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly. However, he continued to write and to pursue theatrical productions, and, according to the recollections of a colleague, he "did better in repartee than in business."
In July 1858, Verne and Aristide Hignard seized an opportunity offered by Hignard's brother: a sea voyage, at no charge, from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland. The journey, Verne's first trip outside of France, deeply impressed him, and upon his return to Paris he fictionalized his recollections to form the backbone of a semi-autobiographical novel, Backwards to Britain. A second complementary voyage in 1861 took Hignard and Verne to Stockholm, from whence they traveled to Christiania and through Telemark. Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.
Verne's situation improved when he met Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), publisher, who also published Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, George Sand, and Erckmann-Chatrian, among others. Hetzel and Verne formed a successful team until Hetzel's death. Hetzel helped improve Verne's writings, which until then had been repeatedly rejected by other publishers. Hetzel read a draft of a Verne story about balloon exploration of Africa; the story had been rejected by other publishers for being "too scientific". Verne rewrote the story, which was published in 1863 in book form as Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon).
From that point, Verne published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these are: Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864); De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1869); and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. The series is collectively known as the Voyages Extraordinaires ("extraordinary voyages"). Verne could now live on his writings. But most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), which he wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery.
Hetzel influenced the written works directly, for Verne was so happy at last to find a willing publisher that he agreed to almost all changes that Hetzel suggested. Hetzel rejected at least one novel (Paris in the Twentieth Century) and asked Verne to change other drafts significantly. One of the most important changes was a general adoption of optimism in the novels. Verne was no enthusiastic celebrator of technological and human progress, a fact revealed by the works created before he met Hetzel and after Hetzel's death. Hetzel's demand for optimistic texts proved correct. For example, The Mysterious Island originally ended with all the survivors returning to the mainland but thereafter feeling nostalgic about their island. Hetzel decided that they should live happily ever after, so in the novel as published they use their fortunes to build a replica of the island. Meanwhile, rather than offend the Russian Empire, a military ally of France, the personal history and motivation of submariner Captain Nemo were changed from those of a Polish refugee, avenging the partitions of Poland and the death of his family during repression of the 1863–64 January Uprising, to those of an Indian prince, fighting from beneath the seas against the British Empire following the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
In 1867, Verne bought a small ship, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. In 1870, he was appointed as "Chevalier" (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in book form. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories – Doctor Ox – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous. Meanwhile, Michel Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress, and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son improved as Michel grew older.
Though he was raised Catholic, Verne became a deist in his later years, from about 1870 onward. Some scholars believe his deist philosophy is reflected in his novels, as they often involve the notion of God or divine providence but rarely mention the concept of Christ.
On 9 March 1886, as Verne was coming home, his twenty-five-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome. This incident was hushed up in the media, but Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum. After the death of both his mother and Hetzel, Jules Verne began publishing darker works. In 1888, Verne entered politics and was elected town councilor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years.
In 1905, while ill with diabetes, Verne died at his home, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son, Michel Verne, oversaw publication of the novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World after Jules's death. The "Voyages extraordinaires" series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were eventually published at the end of the 20th century by the Jules Verne Society (Société Jules Verne).
The original novels published in French by the Jules Verne Society are:
In 1863, Verne had written a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century about a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network, yet cannot find happiness and who comes to a tragic end. Hetzel thought the novel's pessimism would damage Verne's then-blossoming career, and suggested that he wait 20 years to publish it. Verne stored the manuscript in a safe, where it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. The long-lost novel was first published in 1994, and around the same time many other Verne novels and short stories were also published for the first time; these too are gradually appearing in English translations.
Verne's largest body of work is the Voyages Extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1989 and 1994, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel). Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, opera libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.
After his debut under Hetzel, Verne was enthusiastically received in France by writers and scientists alike, with George Sand and Théophile Gautier among his earliest admirers. Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.
However, Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days) led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study. This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of nomination to Verne for membership in the Académie Française, and was far from unrecognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." To Verne, who considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal," this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be seen as the ultimate snub.
This bifurcation of Verne as a popular genre writer but a critical persona non grata continued after his death, with early biographies (including one by Verne's own niece, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe) focusing on error-filled and embroidered hagiography of Verne as a popular figure rather than on Verne's actual working methods or his output. Meanwhile, sales of Verne's novels in their original unabridged versions dropped markedly even in Verne's home country, with abridged versions aimed directly at children taking their place.
However, the decades after Verne's death also saw the rise in France of the "Jules Verne cult," a steadily growing group of scholars and young writers who took Verne's works seriously as literature and willingly noted his influence on their own pioneering works. Some of the cult founded the Sociéte Jules Verne, the first academic society for Verne scholars; many others became highly respected avant garde and surrealist literary figures in their own right. Their praise and analyses, emphasizing Verne's stylistic innovations and enduring literary themes, proved highly influential for literary studies to come.
In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to a sustained wave of serious literary study from well-known French scholars and writers, Verne's reputation skyrocketed in France. Roland Barthes' seminal essay "Nautilus et Bateau Ivre" ("The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat") was influential in its exegesis of the Voyages Extraordinares as a purely literary text, while book-length studies by such figures as Marcel Moré and Jean Chesneaux considered Verne from a multitude of thematic vantage points.
French literary journals devoted entire issues to Verne and his work, with essays by such imposing literary figures as Michel Butor, Georges Borgeaud, Marcel Brion, Pierre Versins, Michel Foucault, René Barjavel, Marcel Lecomte, Francis Lacassin, and Michel Serres; meanwhile, Verne's entire published opus returned to print, with unabridged and illustrated editions of his works printed by Livre de Poche and Éditions Rencontre. The wave reached its climax in Verne's sesquicentennial year 1978, when he was made the subject of an academic colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, and Journey to the Center of the Earth was accepted for the French university system's Agrégation reading list. Since these events, Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.
Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries has been considerably slower in changing. Throughout the 20th century, most Anglophone scholars dismissed Verne as a genre writer for children and a naïve proponent of science and technology (despite strong evidence to the contrary on both counts), thus finding him more interesting as a technological "prophet" or as a subject of comparison to English-language writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells than as a topic of literary study in his own right. This narrow view of Verne has undoubtedly been influenced by the poor-quality English translations and very loosely adapted Hollywood film versions through which most American and British readers have discovered Verne. However, since the mid-1980s a considerable number of serious English-language studies and translations have appeared, suggesting that a rehabilitation of Verne's Anglophone reputation may currently be underway.
Translation of Verne into English began in 1852, when Verne's short story A Voyage in a Balloon was published in the American journal Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art in a translation by Anne T. Wilbur. Translation of his novels began in 1869 with William Lackland's translation of Five Weeks in a Balloon, and continued steadily through Verne's lifetime, with publishers and hired translators often working in great haste to rush his most lucrative titles into English-language print. Unlike Hetzel, who targeted all ages with his publishing strategies for the Voyages Extraordinaires, the British and American publishers of Verne chose to market his books almost exclusively to young audiences; this business move, with its implication that Verne could be treated purely as a children's author, had a long-lasting effect on Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries.
These contemporaneous English-language translations have been widely criticized for their extensive textual omissions, errors, and alterations, and are not considered adequate representations of Verne's actual novels. The writer Adam Roberts, in an essay for The Guardian titled "Jules Verne deserves a better translation service," commented: "I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all.… It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation."
Similarly, the novelist Michael Crichton has observed:
Verne's prose is lean and fast-moving in a peculiarly modern way … [but] Verne has been particularly ill-served by his English translators. At best they have provided us with clunky, choppy, tone-deaf prose. At worst-as in the notorious 1872 'translation' [of Journey to the Center of the Earth] published by Griffith & Farran-they have blithely altered the text, giving Verne's characters new names, and adding whole pages of their own invention, thus effectively obliterating the meaning and tone of Verne's original.
Since 1965, a considerable number of more accurate English translations of Verne have appeared. However, the highly criticized older translations continue to be republished, due to their public domain status and in many cases their easy availability in online sources.
The relationship between Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires and the literary genre science fiction is a complex one. Verne, like H. G. Wells, is frequently cited as one of the founders of the genre, and his profound influence on its development is indisputable; however, many earlier writers, such as Lucian of Samosata and Mary Shelley, have also been cited as creators of science fiction, an ambiguity necessary given the nebulous definition and history of the genre.
A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I do not in any way pose as a scientist" and "I have invented nothing." His own goal was rather to "depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style," as he pointed out in an example:
I wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon, not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa. I always was greatly interested in geography and travel, and I wanted to give a romantic description of Africa. Now, there was no means of taking my travellers through Africa otherwise than in a balloon, and that is why a balloon is introduced.… I may say that at the time I wrote the novel, as now, I had no faith in the possibility of ever steering balloons…
Closely related to Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a "prophet" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace. These claims have a long history, especially in America, but the modern scholarly consensus is that such claims of prophecy are heavily exaggerated. As with science fiction, Verne himself flatly denied classification as a futuristic prophet, saying that any connection between scientific developments and his work were "mere coincidence" and attributing his indisputable scientific accuracy to his extensive research: "even before I began writing stories, I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine, or scientific report that I came across."
The pioneering submarine designer Simon Lake credited his inspiration to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and his autobiography begins "Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life." William Beebe, Sir Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Ballard found similar early inspiration in the novel, and Jacques Cousteau called it his "shipboard bible."
The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont named Verne as his favorite author and the inspiration for his own elaborate flying machines. Igor Sikorsky often quoted Verne and cited his Robur the Conqueror as the inspiration for his invention of the first successful helicopter.
The rocketry innovators Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth are all known to have taken their inspiration from Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission, were similarly inspired, with Borman commenting "In a very real sense, Jules Verne is one of the pioneers of the space age."
Polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, after a flight to the South Pole, paid tribute to Verne's polar novels The Adventures of Captain Hatteras and An Antarctic Mystery by saying "It was Jules Verne who launched me on this trip."
The preeminent speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel noted in several of his scientific reports that his interest in caves was sparked by Verne's Mathias Sandorf. Another influential spelologist, Norbert Casteret, traced his love of "caverns, abysses and underground rivers" to his avid youthful reading of Journey to the Center of the Earth; he called it "a marvelous book, which impressed and fascinated me more than any other," adding "I sometimes re-read it still, each time finding anew the joys and enthusiasm of my childhood."
The French general Hubert Lyautey took much inspiration from the explorations in Verne's novels. When one of his more ambitious foreign projects was met with the reply "All this, sir, it's like doing a Jules Verne," Lyautey famously responded: "Yes, sir, it's like doing a Jules Verne, because for twenty years, the people who move forward have been doing a Jules Verne."
Other scientific figures known to have been influenced by Verne include Fridtjof Nansen, Wernher von Braun, Guglielmo Marconi, and Yuri Gagarin.
Arthur Rimbaud was inspired to write his well-known poem "Le Bateau ivre" after reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which he extensively alludes to within the poem; The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was likely an additional source of inspiration.
In the 1920s, many members of the Surrealist movement named Verne as one of their greatest and most imaginative precursors. Eugene Ionesco said that all of his works, whether directly or indirectly, were written in celebration of Captain Hatteras's conquest of the North Pole. Another surrealist, the Greek poet Andreas Embirikos, paid tribute to Verne in his nine-volume magnum opus The Great Eastern (Megas Anatolikos, 1990), which borrows from Verne's A Floating City and includes Verne himself among its characters.
Raymond Roussel was profoundly influenced both thematically and stylistically by Verne, whom he called a "man of incommensurate genius" and an "incomparable master," adding that in many passages Verne "raised himself to the highest peaks that can be attained by human language."
Jean Cocteau cited both Around the World in Eighty Days and Verne's own 1874 dramatization of it as major childhood influences, calling the novel a "masterpiece" and adding "Play and book alike not only thrilled our young imagination but, better than atlases and maps, whetted our appetite for adventure in far lands. … Never for me will any real ocean have the glamour of that sheet of green canvas, heaved on the backs of the Châtelet stage-hands crawling like caterpillars beneath it, while Phileas and Passepartout from the dismantled hull watch the lights of Liverpool twinkling in the distance."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who discovered the Voyages Extraordinaires as a child and became one of Verne's enthusiastic adult proponents in the first half of the 20th century, used Verne's The Black Indies as inspiration for his own novel Night Flight.
The French experimental writer Georges Perec ardently read and reread Verne's works from adolescence onward, and allusions to Verne appear in many of his novels, including Life A User's Manual, A Gallery Portrait, and W, or the Memory of Childhood. Perec once commented: "When Jules Verne lists all the names of fish over four pages in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, I feel as though I am reading a poem."
The Swiss traveler and writer Nicolas Bouvier cited Verne as his initiation into geography, and named Mathias Sandorf and Phileas Fogg among his childhood heroes.
The English novelist Margaret Drabble was deeply influenced by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a child and remains a fervent admirer of Verne. She comments: "I used to be somewhat ashamed of my love of Verne, but have recently discovered that he is the darling of the French avant-garde, who take him far more seriously than we Anglo-Saxons do. So I'm in good company."
Ray Bradbury counted Verne as a main influence on his own fiction as well as on literature and science the world over, saying "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."
Other literary figures known to have been influenced by Verne include Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Blaise Cendrars, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Aymé, René Barjavel, Claude Roy, Michel Butor, and Roland Barthes. Verne is also often cited as a major influence of the science fiction genre steampunk, though Verne's works themselves are not of the genre.
Because Verne was a longtime resident of Amiens, many places there are named after him, such as the Cirque Jules Verne. Amiens is the place where Verne is buried, and the house where he lived is now a museum. There is also the Jules Verne Museum in Nantes.
A restaurant in the Eiffel Tower in Paris is named "Le Jules Verne". In June 1989, the Jules Verne Food Court opened at the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in the West Midlands of England; however, it had closed by the mid-1990s due to disappointing trade.
In 1961, a large impact crater on the far side of the moon was named Jules Verne in tribute to the writer.
The express train running between Nantes and Paris from 1980 to 1989 was named Jules Verne in the writer's honor. Two French ships were also named after him, and the international prize for around the world sailing records is named the Jules Verne Trophy.
In 1999, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Verne in its fourth annual recognition of two deceased and two living persons, identifying him on its official website as having "helped shape and found modern science fiction." Verne is one of three inductees not from the 20th century (Wells, Verne and Mary Shelley preceded the other inductees by about one, two, and three generations) and one of two inductees not from the Anglophone world (the French artist Jean Giraud was inducted in 2011).
A public francophone secondary school in Vancouver was founded and named École secondaire Jules-Verne in 2007.
On 9 March 2008, the European Space Agency launched an unmanned resupply spacecraft named the Jules Verne ATV on a mission to bring supplies and cargo to the International Space Station. In homage to Verne's astronomical writings, the craft carried two handwritten manuscript pages from Verne's files as well as a Hetzel double edition of From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon published in Verne's lifetime.
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