The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (2 page)

“The True Story of
Barbicane’s Voyage” © 1999 by Laurent Genefort. Originally published as “Le Veritable
Voyage de Barbicane” in
Futurs anterieurs
(Fleuve noir, 1999). It is
published here in English for the first time. Printed by permission of the
author.

Our thanks to Jean-Marc
Lofficier and Victor Berch for their advice and help.

Jules Verne was a
phenomenon.

In a writing life
spanning over forty years, he produced more than sixty novels of adventure and
exploration, creating a sub-genre of fiction that exploded on to the world at a
time when both the advances of science and technology, and the physical
exploration of the world, were proceeding at an exponential rate.

Jules Verne was born in
Nantes in 1828, to a prosperous middle-class family. His father was a
successful lawyer who hoped that his eldest son might follow him into the
profession. But Verne dreamed of adventure. As a boy, living in the port of
Nantes, he day-dreamed of sailing around the world. Family legend has it that
he even stowed away aboard a ship, only to be dragged home by his irate father
when the ship docked further down the French coast. In 1848 Verne did escape —
though only as far as Paris, where he combined working on the stock exchange
with penning much bad poetry and short comedy plays which were staged at the Théâtre
Lyrique and the Théâtre Historique, without success or critical acclaim.

He sold a few short
stories around this time, the first being “Les Premiers Navires de la marine
mexicaine” (usually translated as “The Mutineers” or “A Drama in Mexico”) which
appeared in the monthly
magazine Musée des families
in July 1851.

It was not until 1863,
with the publication of his first book,
Five Weeks in a Balloon,
that
success and acclaim eventually came to Verne. This is the story of Dr
Fergusson, his
friend Dick Kennedy and loyal man-servant
Joe Smith, and their intrepid balloon journey across the continent of Africa
from Zanzibar to Senegal. Headlong adventure alternates with much (often, it
must be said,
too
much) scientific detail — but the story caught the
imagination of readers in France, Britain and America. The novel was a
best-seller, its documentary narrative convincing some readers that it was a
true account.

Verne was fortunate that
his publisher, Jules Hetzel, was one of the most enterprising in France, and he
saw the potential in Verne’s work. He gave Verne a contract for three books a
year and also used Verne as the final catalyst to launch his new magazine for
younger readers, the
Magasin d’Education et de Récréation.
The first
issue appeared on 20 March 1864 featuring the opening instalment of Verne’s new
novel,
Les Anglais au Pole Nord (The English at the North Pole).

With a publisher keen to
bring out his books, many serialized during the year and published in volume
form in time for Christmas, Jules Verne’s writing career was under way. Over
the course of the next ten years he wrote the novels for which he is famous
today:
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
(1864),
From the Earth to
the Moon
(1865),
Round the Moon (1870), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
the Sea (1873), Around the World in Eighty Days
(1873), and
The
Mysterious Island
(1874). These novels sold in their tens of thousands and
Verne became a wealthy man, often turning out two novels a year in a non-stop
writing routine that was to last until his death in 1905.

His later books
abandoned much of the scientific detail of his early novels, and he
concentrated on portraying adventures set in the four corners of the globe.
While these were not as popular as his scientific romances, and sales declined
towards the end of his life, his work was still in sufficient demand after his
death for his publisher to bring out several volumes co-authored with (and some
wholly written by) his son Michel.

Verne is often cited
today as one of the founding fathers
of science fiction,
along with H.G. Wells. The fact is that Verne rarely extrapolated from
scientific advances to create visions of the future — his novels were firmly
grounded in the here and now of the late Victorian period. The genre Verne
created had no name — though it’s as much the forerunner of the modern
techno-thriller as it was science fiction — and there were precious few other
exponents: he was a craftsman who chiselled out his own niche to create stories
wholly Vernian. In his better known and most highly regarded novels, he tapped
into the burgeoning scientific curiosity of the age and brought a clear-minded
technological understanding to stirring stories of derring-do and adventure in
various parts of the world — as well as under the sea and in space.

Looking back, it is easy to credit Verne with greater originality
than in fact he possessed. His first novel,
Five Weeks in a Balloon
(1863),
was suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax” (1844). Another Poe
story,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
(1837), inspired
Verne to write a direct sequel,
The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields
(1897). His
two-part novel
From the Earth to the Moon
(1865) and
Round the Moon
(1870),
were preceded by Irish author Murtagh McDermot’s
Trip to the Moon
(1728),
whose hero’s return from the moon is assisted by 7,000 barrels of gunpowder and
a cylindrical hole dug one mile deep into the moon’s surface — a foreshadowing
of Verne’s means of firing his own characters moon-ward from the barrel of a
giant gun. Verne’s
Clipper of the Clouds
(1886), and the sequel
The
Master of the World
(1904), featuring a massive propeller-driven airship
The
Albatross, lifted
ideas from the works of the US writer Luis Senarens
(Frank
Reade
Jnr
and his Air Ship, Frank Reade Jnr in the Clouds,
etc) with
whom Verne corresponded.
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
(1864), was
not the first story of subterranean adventure: the German physicist Athanasius
Kircher (1601-1680) was the author of
Mundus Subterraneus,
and in 1741
Ludvig Baron von Holberg published
Nicolai Klimii iter Subterraneum,
the
story of mountaineer Klim and his adventures after falling down a hole in the
Alps and discovering a miniature subterranean solar system.
Mathias Sandorf
(1885)
is Verne’s take on Dumas’
The Count of Monte Cristo
(1844), while his
fascination with shipwrecked heroes can be traced back to Defoe’s
Robinson
Crusoe (1719)
and J.R. Weiss’
Swiss Family Robinson (1812):
Verne
even referred to his own ‘castaway’ books as Robinsonades.

However, to accuse Verne
of lack of originality would be to miss the point. He was original in his
genius of marrying the latest technological breakthroughs with geographical
adventure, written with a keen eye for scientific detail which convinced the
reader that, no matter how far-fetched the adventure, the events portrayed were
indeed
possible.
The first submarine had been built and tested by
Cornelius Drebble in 1620 and a submarine, the
Henley,
was used in the
American Civil War in 1864, so Verne was hardly predicting the vessel. But his
vision of a super-powered submarine capable of travelling around the world was
the inspiration that led to the first nuclear-powered submarine eventually
launched in 1955 and named the
USS Nautilus
in deference to Verne’s
creation. It was Verne’s vision in pushing the barriers of technology and
exploring the world that emerged which was a major factor in encouraging the
technological revolution that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth
century.

Verne also created some
of the most memorable characters in fiction. Once encountered who can forget
Phileas Fogg, Captain Nemo, Impey Barbicane or the mysterious Robur,
forerunners in some ways of the later “mad scientist”. If he were alive today
Verne would have been an ideal candidate for continuing the James Bond novels!

Jules Verne’s writing
life encompassed much of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time of
great upheaval, scientific enlightenment, and social change. His work,
reflecting the ideas and ideals of his time, has the enduring appeal of all
literature written with passion and commitment. That it is still being read
over a hundred years after it was written is a testament to Verne’s ability to
communicate to generation after generation of readers the wonder of adventure
and exploration.

This volume, published
on the centenary of Verne’s death, presents twenty-three stories in homage to
the French master of adventure. Using as a starting point the works of Jules
Verne, his ideas, stories and characters and the life of the man himself, the
gathered writers have produced a range of entertaining, adventurous, and
thought-provoking stories. Ian Watson, for instance, reveals the true
adventures that inspired
Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Mike
Mallory unveils the mystery of the later life of Captain Nemo, whilst Molly
Brown recounts the final endeavour of the Baltimore Gun Club. There are further
sequels to Verve’s best known books, as well as stories based on some of his
lesser known novels and stories.

We’d like to think that
Jules Verne would have approved.

We are all the products
of our childhood and one may wonder just what events the young Jules-Gabriel
Verne witnessed that later fired his imagination for his great adventure
stories. Here, as a prelude to those later adventures, Stephen Baxter takes a
flight of fancy to Verne’s infancy and the dawn of the railways.

“He came to Liverpool,”
the old man said to me. “The French fellow. He came here! Or at least he rode
by on the embankment. He came with his father to see the industrial wonder of
the age. And not only that, though he was only a child, he saved the life of a
very important man. You won’t read it in any of the history books. It was all a
bit of a scandal. But it’s true nonetheless. I’ve got proof . . .” And he
produced a tin box, which he began to prise open with long, trembling fingers.

It was 1980. I was in my
twenties. I had come back to my childhood home to visit family and friends.

And on a whim I had
called in on old Albert Rastrick, who lived in a pretty old house called the
Toll Gate Lodge, on the Liverpool road about half a mile from my parents’

home. I’d got to know
Albert ten years before when I had come knocking on his door asking questions
about local history for a school project. He was a nice old guy, long widowed,
and his house was full of mementoes of family, and of the deeper history of the
house itself.

But he had been born
with the century, so he was eighty years old. His living room with its single
window was a dark, cluttered, dusty cavern. Sitting there with a cup of
lukewarm tea, watching Albert struggle with that tin box, I was guiltily
impatient to be gone.

He got the box open and
produced a heap of papers, tied up with a purple ribbon. It was a manuscript,
written out in a slightly wild copperplate. “A Drama on the Railway,” it was
titled, “An Autobiographical Memoir, by Lily Rastrick (Mrs.)
née
Ord . .
.”

“Lily was my
great-great-grandmother,” Albert said. “Born 1810, I believe. Produced my
great-grandfather in 1832, who produced my granddad in 1851, who produced my
father in 1876, who produced
me.
All those generations born and raised
in this old house. And all that time that tin box has stayed in the family. Go
on, read it,” he snapped.

I gently loosened the
knot in the purple ribbon. Dust scattered from the folds, but the material,
perhaps silk, was still supple. The paper was thick, creamy, obviously high quality.
I lifted the first page to see better in the light of the small window: “It was
on the 15th Sept. in the year 18—

that I defied the wishes of my Father and attended the opening of
the new railway. But I could scarce have imagined the adventure that would
unfold for me that day!” Albert levered himself out of his chair. “More tea?”

Lily wrote: