Jules Verne is usually hailed as a writer with great foresight, etc. predicting so many marvelous technological inventions. I suddenly broke an ethnocentric barrier and am now wondering if there was works done in a language besides English whose author topped Jules’ predictions.
Is there?
Well, Verne wrote in French…
In The Crusades, Terry Jones quoted a Medieval Arab philosopher who speculated that dividing the smallest portion of a substance would unleash an explosion great enough to destroy the world. That’s in Verne’s league.
I can honestly say that I did not know Verne wrote in French…
Okay, that changes the question a bit, but the spirit’s the same.
there’s always Nostradamus. if you are into that sort of thing.
Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a dystopic novel called WE. You might try that. He was Russian. Wrote in the 20’s, I believe.
Depends upon what you mean by “better”.
Jules Verne was a writer in the best traditions of science fiction – he carefully researched his topic, then wrote about it in such a way as to convince you that the new technology was possible. It wasn’t really his job to predict the future – that’s not the job of any science fiction writer, really – but to write a good story that carries the conviction that it is possible. Inevitably, doing this ends up “predicting” the future. Verne was damned good at this. In Robur the Conqueror, for instance, he has the heavier-than-air ship built out of composite materials – combining great strength with light weight. In From the Earth to the Moon, his space capsule was made of aluminum, just like the ones that were eventually used in real life.
Verne himself acknowledged that he was following in the footsteps of Edgar Allen Poe (who was popular in France), even going to far as to writing a sequel to Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”.
There were many other science fiction writers at the time. Some, like H.G. Wells, were well known. Others were less known.
There are a few SF writers who were undeseveredly forgotten, and many of these came from other countries. When Fritz Lang (director of Metropolis, among other films) was asked which writers were his inspiration, he named Verne and Wells, but also several German science fiction writers. I’m ashamed to say that I can’t remember their names. IIRC, their works haven’t been translated into English, or else are hard to find. One, at least, was a contemporary of Verne’s.
An awful lot of early SF was written in English, by British and American writers, but there were always authors in other countries, and their contributions haven’t been widely known or appreciated. You can find out about a lot of them by looking in Klute and Nicholls’ Science Fiction Encyclopedia and looking up the entry for each country.
One SF paragon (although more on the psychological than the technological side, I guess) is the Polish Stanislav Lem (Solaris)
Dani
Duh! “Was” not “is” (at least I’m pretty sure he’s dead)
Yeah, but Lem is a lot more recent than Verne or the others I cited.
[nitpick]Definitely check out the Encycopedia of Science Fiction, but look for it under Clute, as in John Clute and Peter Nicholls.[/nitpick]
[nitpick2]
Lem is still alive, at least as of last month:
http://www.cyberiad.info/english/main.htm
[/nitpick2]
For early “hard” SF written by a foreign type, then you should check out Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Often referred to as the father of the Soviet Space program, he also wrote books which, although primitive by today’s standards, are filled with much more science than Verne could ever hope to understand
Here’s a really good Tsiolkovsky site which focuses on his contributions to space technology.
Cyrano de Bergerac invented the ramjet maybe
DaVinci was not a science fiction writer, but he predicted Helecopters, Airplanes, Automatic Cannon, Tanks, and other things.
Does he count?
There’s also Albert Robida