Jules Verne and the Media

Abstract

502 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) provide a convenient overview of the tradition. The book perhaps lacks a comprehensive discussion of the concept of history, and of the multiple competing narratives jostling for hegemony. While some chapters address this topic in specific textual contexts, a more general discussion would have helped. On the whole, however, this collection is a welcome addition to scholarship on alternative histories.—Suparno Banerjee, Texas State University Jules Verne and the Media. Guillaume Pinson and Maxime Prévost, eds. Jules Verne et la culture médiatique [Jules Verne and Media Culture]. Québec, Canada: Presses de l’Université Laval, COLLECTION LITTÉRATURE ET IMAGINAIRE CONTEMPORAIN, 2019. viii+256 pp. CAN$29.95 pbk and ebk. In their introduction to this recent collection of essays on Verne, the editors make the observation that few authors of world literature were as deeply immersed in the media culture of their time as Jules Verne. They may be right. During his writing career Verne leaned heavily on newspapers, popular magazines, and scientific journals both for plot ideas and technical documentation for the 50+ novels of his Voyages Extraordinaires. As he explained during one of his many interviews: I am a great reader, and ... I always read pencil in hand. I always carry a notebook about with me and immediately jot down ... anything that interests me or may appear to be of possible use in my books. To give you an idea of my reading, I come here every day after lunch and immediately set to work to read through fifteen different papers, always the same fifteen, and I can tell you that very little in any of them escapes my attention. When I see anything of interest, down it goes. Then I read the reviews, such as the Revue Bleue, the Revue Rose, the Revue des Deux Mondes, Cosmos, Tissandier’s La Nature, and Flammarion’s L’Astronomie. I also read through the bulletins of the scientific societies, especially those of the Geographical Society.... (R.H. Sherard, “Jules Verne at Home.” McClure’s Magazine 2.2 [Jan. 1894]: 120-21) It is also important to remember that the majority of Verne’s novels first appeared in his publisher Hetzel’s semimonthly periodical, the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation [Magazine of Education and Recreation], before being reprinted as octavo books and translated into many languages. As a lucrative follow-up to his early work in the theater, Verne had a hand in adapting several of his more popular novels to the stage; Around the World in Eighty Days (1874), for example, played to sell-out crowds in over 3000 performances between the late 1870s and 1940 (see Jean-Michel Margot, “Jules Verne, Playwright” SFS 32.1 [2005]: 150-71). The nineteenth-century press is further represented by the many newspaper reporters and journalists who populate Verne’s narratives, including Gédéon Spilett in The Mysterious Island (1870), Alcide Jolivet and Harry Blount in Michael Strogoff (1876), Claudius Bombarnac in the novel of the same name (1892), and Harris Kymbale in The Will of an Eccentric (1899). In the American pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, editors such as Hugo Gernsback popularized the notion of Verne as one of the inventors of “scientifiction” (a drawing of Verne’s tombstone even appeared on the title page of Amazing Stories). And Verne later became 503 BOOKS IN REVIEW universally recognized as “the father of science fiction on screen” (Brian Taves, Hollywood Presents Jules Verne, 2015) with several blockbuster films such as 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1916, 1954), From the Earth to the Moon (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959, 1999), Master of the World (1961) and Mysterious Island (1961, 2012). Finally, beginning in the late 1980s, Verne’s romans scientifiques and their many spin-offs are credited with having inspired the retrofuturistic neo-Victorian sf subgenre known as steampunk. Much like steampunk—which owes its popularity more to its aesthetic (fashion, art objects, and architectural style) than its print narratives—Verne’s relationship to media culture goes much deeper than his literary production. As Jean-Michel Margot correctly observes, during his lifetime Verne...