I’m a BIG fan of Jules Verne. I’ve been collecting his books for years, and I marvel at his research and imagination. I’ve mentioned some of his accomplishments on this Board and in Teemings. I’m willing to cut him some slack, like when he shoots his travelers to the moon in a giant gun (the shock would reduce the passengers in his moon rocket to jelly, but he had to get them up there somehow). But he usually keeps such things to a miniimum.
I’ve been reading Dick Sands: A Captain at 15. I was a little annoyed at the start, because the titular Sands is an orphan, named after Sandy Hook, where he was found. But Verne has him raised in an orphanage in Albany, N.Y., which makes no sense. Sandy Hook is in New Jersey, so if he was sent to a capital it would have been Trenton. But it’s far more likely that a foundling would be raised in an orphanage closer to Sandy Hook. That’s all just sloppiness on Verne’s part.
But halfway through the book I learn that Sands, doing his damndest to pilot his ship across part of the Pacific after the Captain and most of the crew have been killed (and against the unknown menace of a traitor on board who has sabotaged the compass), ends up on the coast of Africa (!!!) Not content with this, he has his party then trek inland for 100 miles before they realize this.
I can appreciate his desire to want to put his characters there, but even the inexperience of his captain and the cunning of the traitor can’t pull this off. The crude sabotage wouldn’t allow for the fine tuning of the course to get them unnoticed around Cape Horn. You don’t just happen to pass through the stormy Straits of Magellan without noticing it. And you’d have to be damned lucky to sail around the world and just happen to luck into a confederate as soon as you touched land (as the traitor does) who can help you completely hoodwink the crew.
Could they have been sailing west? Landing on the east coast of Africa?
Or, I suppose, it’s barely possible that Verne could have been having an off day when he wrote that book; they can’t all be masterpieces. Even Alfred Bester wrote The Computer Connection
Nope – I checked the book again, and it’s pretty clear that they were sailing east, and had unknowingly passed around the southern tip of South America.
I’m willing to forgive the first error in geography. After all, Verne was a Frenchman, and I don’t think he was ever in America himself. Most Europeans don’t realize just how big the U. S. is, nor grasp the significance of the states. But if it was important to end up in Africa, couldn’t he have just started them off in the Atlantic? Or was there some important reason to the plot for it to be the Pacific?
Personally, my Big Disappointment with Verne came with Paris in the Twentieth Century, his recently discovered and posthumously published second novel. It’s not nearly as prescient as most of his other works (which may indicate that real inventors and engineers are taking their inspiration from Verne), and the style is very artificial. It’s narrated as if the main character is surprised by everything “modern” he sees, but he’s no Rip Van Winkle. He was born and raised in those times, and should have been perfectly familiar with it all. There’s also a strong theme of “Oh, no, such-and-such is done with electricity now, too! Electricity is everywhere! You can’t escape it!”, as if that were a bad thing somehow.
I never read Dick Sands but it doesn’t surprise me it wasn’t that good. Even Verne couldn’t always write good books.
His Paris in the Twenthieth Century is trash from beggining to end.
There’s also an unfinished one about a family of shipwrecks in an island that is particularly irritating. Uncle Robinson I think it was called. Every ten paragraphs one of the carachters mentioned that, unlike the swiss family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe, being a shipwreck is not fun and that they didn’t find three incredibly useful resources every day.
Great, I agree. But do you really have to say that every five freacking minutes?
It was a pretty dark book and some of the family die I think. Just when pirates are about to appear the manuscript stops.
What’s wrong with The Computer Connection? I loved that book!
I don’t think you can say that about Verne. Having read quite a few of his books, it’s pretty clear to me that he wrote with a map in front of him. His descriptions are pretty exact in 20,000 Leagues, Captain Antifer, Around the World in 80 days, etc. He’s incredibly detailed in lunar geography in Around the Moon. And Dick Sands is not an early book – he wrote it about 1868. Verne wasn’t ignorant – he just wanted his passengers to get unexpectedly to Africa, so he pulled an incredible stretch.
Okay, it takes place during the Civil War, doesn’t it? The union prisoners steal a balloon and somehow drift to the mysterious island, where eventually they meet Capt. Nemo from “20,000 leagues under the Sea”.
Okay, this is where it gets tricky. If I recall correctly, Nemo dies in Mysterious Island(after supposdly dying in 20,000 leagues). However, one of the prisoners mentions hearing about Capt. Nemo from Prof. A and friends, I seem to recall.
The problem: 20,000 leagues took place in 1866-1867.
Mysterious Island apparently takes place during the Civil War 1861-1865.
Another possibility: Who tells us that they’re in Africa? An omniscient narrator, or a fallible character? If they landed in Australia, for instance, and met black-skinned natives, they might (mistakenly) think themselves in Africa. If so, this would be the setup for a plot twist later in the book.
I don’t have a copy of MYSTERIOUS ISLAND handy. But to add to the date problem, my ANNOTATED 20,000 LEAGUES (by Walter James Miller (1976) says that we learn in MYSTERIOUS ISLAND that, after the events of 20,000 LEAGUES, Nemo explored for 13 more years, which would set MYSTERIOUS ISLAND at around 1880, which is kind of strange since the book was published in 1875.
However, authors back then didn’t pay much attention to details like dates. Note the Sherlock Holmes stories, and their complete inattention to dates. Authors then did not expect readers to analyze or nit-pick to the extent that modern authors do.
On the more serious criticisms, the Foreword to the ANNOTATED 20,000 LEAGUES does say that English translations of Verne have often been botched and/or hideously abridged. One noted translator (Edward Roth, translating in the 1870s and 1880s) actually said in his Preface that he “improved” on Verne, by adding events and situations. The other major early translator was Lewis Page Mercier (who used different combinations of his name in translating different works) whose translations are laden with errors.
So, first, don’t judge Verne harshly if you’re reading an English translation. It may be that the translator just omitted passages about the passage (heh) from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And second, heck, even the greatest of writers are entitled to a flub now and again.
Master of the World was a big non-event. Okay, so Robur has come up with this super-fast amphibious vehicle that can fly. It seems to be good for nothing except making a nuisance of itself and it buzzes around doing nothing else until it finally comes to a sticky end for no real reason whatever.
Admittedly when I bought the book I was expecting something more like the film, which was largely based on Robur the Conqueror, but even allowing for the difference, I thought Verne hurdled the marine predator with this one. It’s symptomatic of how dire I found the book that I never read it and got rid of it at a car-boot sale.
< Blush > Yes, sorry, kellner, I originally wrote asking whether y’all were sure of the date of MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (I know that awful movie was set in the Civil War but…) and then I said, hmmm, let’s look online, and I found that the book is clearly set then, so I edited the post.
Normally, edited posts will show a cute li’l note that indicates it was edited. I’m not sure why it didn’t. I do apologize, I should have posted a second time.
I’ll back this up. I have some relatives in Italy. Well educated, travelled people. They came to the US and stayed with us in Colorado a few years back. We were pretty surprised when we heard one of their day trips. They were going to drive out to Disneyworld, stay there for most of the day and then hit Vegas on the way back. They’d stay there over-night, then the next day hit the Grand Canyon and Santa Fe before getting back. Heh. They were pretty shocked when we pointed out the actual distances and times (Denver->LA 16 hour drive, LA->Vegas 4 hours, Vegas->Grand Canyon ~3 hours?, Grand Canyon->Santa Fe ~8 hours?, Santa Fe->Denver 6 hours) and that there was no way to do it in two days and still have time to actually see or do anything.
I’ll re-iterate here – Verne knew his geography, and it’s pretty clear that he’s got Dick Sands sailing Eastward toward the coast of South America, when the Bad Guy uses a lump of iron to deflect the compass and throw the ship off-course, sending them around Cape Horn and landing on the coast of Africa (there are ostriches and hippopotamuses – they ain’t in South America).
Mention of The Mysterious Island makes me think of the geographical problems with that one, too – a bunch of Civil War officers takes off in a balloon and a storm takes them to the South Pacific (!!!) It seems, to put it mildly, unlikely, but still not in a class with not noticing you’ve passed through the Straits of Magellan.
And you can’t blame this one on the translators. I’ve got The Annotated 20,000 Leagues and The Annotated From the Earth to the Moon – both books were ruined by Lewis Mercier and other translators (Walter James Miller later published his own translation of 20,000 Leagues), but that’s clearly not the case here.
It gets worse. Verne has not just one, but two characters die of spontaneous combustion.
I can understand Dickens pulling a stunt like this, and dispatching the gin-soaked Krook that way, but Verne is supposed to be our scientific romanticist. Yet in Dick sand he succumbs to the 19th century belief that habitual drunkards have bodies so saturated with alcohol that they readily catch flame. (Technically, it’s not “spontaneous” combustion, since both characters catch fire from an open flame, but even Verne uses the term “spontaneous combustion” )
And I know that we shouldn’t judge by the standards of our age, but there was plenty of skepticism towards Human Spontaneous Combustion back then, too.
