Scarcely more than a century after Jules Verne published one of the most enduring and captivating novels of the nineteenth century in 1865-
From the Earth to the Moon-Apollo 8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968 carrying the first human beings to fly around another celestial body. With uncanny futuristic vision, Verne had not only anticipated that the launch would take place from Florida, but he also foresaw a three man crew traveling in a capsule with approximately the same dimensions as the Apollo Command Module, and he had already worked out the necessary launch velocity required to escape the earth's gravity. Though the literary term would not be invented for another seventy years, many critics agree that Verne can be legitimately called the "inventor of Science Fiction."
Jules Gabriel Verne was born February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France, and was the oldest of five children. His father was a lawyer and an authoritarian figure who struggled in vain throughout his life to control his adventurous son. More than one biographer has related with delight the story of how young Jules at eleven years of age stowed away on the ship
Coralie, bound for the West Indies. Though a recent biography has exposed the tale as almost surely apocryphal, it has survived because it seems so characteristic of Verne-even down to the alleged promise he made to his distraught mother: "From now on, I'll travel only in my imagination." In any case, the imaginary travels of Jules Verne became the titles of such world-famous books as
Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and most audacious of all-
From the Earthto the Moon.
Young Jules was not a remarkable student. Though he did well in Latin and Greek and clearly demonstrated competence at learning, he showed none of the genius or scientific bent that would define his eventual work. In fact, the marks he made in spelling, grammar, physics, and chemistry were just barely passing. While he professed an early fascination with machinery and gear-works, and later developed a reverence for the power of science to change the course of everyday life, he was never a scientist himself. Nevertheless, his vibrant adventure stories made use of the latest scientific theories, and they popularized those developments for the reading public, often with almost prophetic vision.
Verne's personal life was marked by slow success at his chosen career-writing-and only eventual success in love. In both arenas he faltered, and was ultimately more successful in his career than at romance. He fell in love with his cousin Caroline when he was twelve years old and was chagrined by her rejection and eventual marriage to a forty-year-old merchant while Jules was away at college. This failure was to set a pattern that would predominate for much of his life.
He traveled to Paris in 1848 to study law, where he witnessed the famous February Revolution led by the celebrated romantic poet Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine (1790-1869). Like most other details of his life, Verne's politics have been debated by biographers. Though most accounts depict him as a "rebel" (if in sensibility more than in practice), Verne cannot be so easily pigeonholed. Herbert Lottman suggests he was generally conservative, though he came out strongly in favor of free speech. Throughout his life, Verne sympathized with the working classes, and believed that the bourgeoisie failed to appreciate his genius and rejected his style.
Though he had finished his examinations and was qualified to assume the family law practice in Nantes, Verne was seduced by the literary lifestyle that he had begun to cultivate while at school. He counted among his friends such luminaries as Alexandre Dumas
père, who produced Verne's first professional literary effort, a play called
Broken Straws. The play was staged in 1850, and received some flattering attention. Verne was even closer to Alexandre Dumas
fils, author of the sensational
Camille, who helped Verne with the actual writing of
Broken Straws. Based on his first modest success, Verne decided to abandon the law and stay in Paris to devote himself to writing.
While living in Paris, he suffered another bout of unrequited love at the hands of Herminie Arnault-Grossetière. The bitterness he felt from this and previous jilting accumulated, and his attitude toward women, as often expressed in his novels, has occasionally earned him a dubious reputation for misogyny. It is true that many of his adventure novels (including
From the Earth to the Moon) lack authentic or interesting female characters, though this is a sin of omission rather than commission, and as a sexist, Verne was surely a product of his times.
In any case, Verne eventually met and married the widow Honorine Morel, (
née de Viane) in 1857. They remained married throughout his life, though their relationship was often strained and incommunicative. Verne's only child, a son named Michel, was born in 1861.
Verne sold his first novel in 1862 to Pierre Hetzel, who signed Verne to a twenty-year contract under which Verne was expected to produce three novels a year. The first novel was
Five Weeks in a Balloon, which was an immediate best seller. With it, Verne essentially inaugurated a new genre in literature, one which Hugo Gernsback would give the name "scientifiction" in 1920s, by which, he said, "I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story-a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision." While it is true that Verne was inspired by his reading of Poe, he infused his novels with science, rather than gothic imagination, thereby raising the bar for future purveyors of fantastic adventure tales.
From the Earth to the Moon is both a flattering paean to American ingenuity and a satire of the human preoccupation with war. Only in America, Verne writes, could engineers and visionaries be given free reign to enact such a grandiose scheme as traveling to the moon. "The Yankees, the best mechanics on earth," he explains, "are natural born engineers, as the Italians are natural born musicians, and the Germans are natural born philosophers."
But ordinarily, such engineering prowess is exploited only for making war.
From the Earth to the Moon opens as the War Between the States has drawn to a bloody close and former generals and warmongers are clamoring for a project on which to unleash their pent-up martial energy and freshly honed ballistic skills. Modern readers are amazed at Verne's prescience in imagining that such a grand enterprise as traveling to the moon could only take place in a postwar redirection of political and military energy. The NASA space program of the 1960s, of course, grew out of the technology that the United States inherited from the vanquished Germans at the end of World War II. Verne would have appreciated the irony inherent in the fact that essentially the same rockets that carried bombs to London were redesigned by their makers twenty-five years later to carry astronauts 240,000 miles across space to the moon.
In fact, Verne blatantly links the audacious enterprise of conquering the moon to the well-rehearsed American policy of Manifest Destiny when he has Barbican, the president of the Baltimore Gun Club, address its membership:
There is no one among you, gentlemen, who has not gazed long and carefully on the Moon, or at least who has not heard of those that have. . . . For us is perhaps reserved the glory of being the Columbuses of another new world. Have confidence in me and second me by all the means in your power, and I shall guide you to her State or Territory, which we shall annex to all the other States and Territories that form the totality of our glorious Union!
Though Verne's novels are typically categorized as "
romans scientifiques,"
From the Earth to the Moon is also clearly a satire of military mentality and the politics of annexation. It is perhaps unique among anti-war novels in that it does not merely decry the human urge for war, but suggests a way to channel that apparently universal impulse toward a more productive and sanguine end.
Verne builds his fantastic story about traveling to the moon on the firm foundation of nineteenth-century scientific knowledge and technology, which lends a sense of credibility to what had long been a purely fanciful idea. For the first time in the history of literature, Verne offered a believable account of the scientific details that would have to be considered if human beings
really wanted to go to the moon. Verne's novel moved a dream that had previously only existed in the human imagination into the realm of mechanical possibility. As one critic wrote in 1870, "Mr. Verne's fantasy doesn't lead science astray, it only gives it wings and helps it to fly."
Accordingly, Verne included a series of "technical" chapters in the novel that gave readers a crash course in selenography (the scientific study of the moon), Newtonian mechanics, ballistics, astronomy, and the science of explosives. Schoolteachers everywhere have long appreciated Verne because his books satisfy both of Horace's requirements for "great" literature: They are not merely entertaining to students, but they are also educational.
From the Earth to the Moon contains a wealth of information that has never gone out of date.
Verne has sometimes been criticized for sacrificing the "literary" aspects of his books-the characters and their motives, for example-to the "scientific" cause. The characters are papier-mâché, such critics charge, and the conflicts between characters are inconsequential. Certainly Verne may be guilty of occasionally subordinating his "literary" impulses to his "scientific" purposes, resulting in fictions that are sometimes thin and characters who remain one-dimensional. But others of his characters have emerged as figures with lives larger than the books that contain them: Captain Nemo (from
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) is surely as well known as his more "literary" counterpart, Captain Ahab.
And many of Verne's heroes are drawn from actual figures. The dynamic hero of Verne's moon novels, Michel Ardan, was inspired in part by the charismatic nineteenth-century French personality Felix Tournachon, known by his pseudonym Nadar, who had made a name for himself as an early practitioner of the fledgling art of photography. By 1862, Nadar had become interested in aeronautics, an irrepressible passion that Verne found contagious. When Verne modeled his hero of
From the Earth to the Moon, he transposed the name to Ardan.
From the Earth to the Moon draws to a mysterious and tense close, with our heroes flying somewhere in space, and their earthbound comrades anxiously hoping that all has gone well and that they are on a course to the moon. Naturally, such a cliffhanger demanded a sequel, which Verne delivered five years later with
Around the Moon (1870), which catalogues the adventures of the nineteenth-century astronauts as they circle the moon and prepare for a splashdown in the Pacific. Once again, Verne's prophetic imagination was astounding.
Though Verne is sometimes criticized for his faulty mechanical ideas and a vision of the future that frequently missed the mark, such criticisms come from those blessed with that well-known power of observation we call 20/20 hindsight. He was right as often as he was wrong about the future, and even when he missed on the details, as Lottman notes, "he often came close." Verne's conception of the cannon that fires his rocket to the moon, for example, would not have worked in actual practice, but the general principle (drawn directly from Newton) is sound, and Walter James Miller reported in 1995 that NASA was considering a similar "space-gun."
In the twentieth century, Verne's popularity has continued to grow. Many of his titles are now considered classics, and such luminaries of the literary establishment as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have expressed their admiration and approval of his work. In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke, author of
2001: A Space Odyssey, eulogized Verne thus:
There can never be another Jules Verne, for he was born at a unique moment of time. He grew up when the steam engine was changing the material world, and the discoveries of science were changing the world of the mind. . . . He was the first writer to welcome change and to proclaim that scientific discovery could be the most wonderful of all adventures. For this reason, he will never grow out-of-date.
Verne died in 1905, from complications arising from the diabetes he had suffered from for years. He went to his grave having written over one hundred books, some of which were not published until years later. He earned over one million francs from his works, an unprecedented figure for its time, and this in spite of a contractual arrangement with Hetzel that clearly took advantage of him. Verne was adored by audiences of readers the world over, and had achieved France's highest award, the Legion of Honor. But perhaps the honor for which he would have been most proud is a humble pockmark on the far side of the moon-at Latitude 35 South and Longitude 147 East-now known as Jules Verne Crater.
Aaron Parrett is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Great Falls in Montana. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia and is the author of
The Translunar Narrative in the Western Tradition.
