Verne, Jules

(1828-1905)

   writer

   Regarded as the father of the science fiction genre, Jule Verne was born in Nantes and, while studying law in Paris, decided to pursue a career in letters. Toward the end of 1851, he began to write plays and librettos and also his first short stories (Les Premiers Navires de la marine mexicaine and Un voyage en ballon, 1851), followed in 1854 by a historical novel, Martin Paz and, in 1855, Un hivernage dans les glaces. Numerous visits at this time to the National Library allowed him to acquire a scientific vocabulary and knowledge so that he could take advantage of the popular interest in the science of the period. Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe's use of fantasy in his writings, Verne published a novel, Maîre Zacharius ou l'horloger qui a perdu son âme, and began work on the first manuscripts by Cinq semaines en ballon, which, when published in 1863, was an immediate success. it is the first volume of a series, Les Voyages extraordinaires, which includes also Les Aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1864), Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (1867-68), the famous Vingt-mille lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues under the Sea; 1870), Une ville flottante (1871), Au pays des fourrur-ers (1873), the celebrated Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in Eighty Days; 1873), Une capitaine de quinze ans (1878), Deux ans de vacances (1888), Mrs. Branican (1891), L'Île à hélice (1895), Le Sphinx des glaces (1897), and L'Étonante Aventure de la mission Barsac (1910). Fascinated by aeronautics, Verne founded in 1862 with nadar a society for research into the possibility of air flight. Nadar did achieve a number of balloon ascensions, and the heroes in Verne's novels imitated him in both lighter- and heavier-than-air flights, as in the well-known De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon; 1865). Along with exploration of outer and interplanetary space was that of earthly or oceanic realms, as in Voyages au center de la Terre (1864). Although much interested in inventions of the future, many of which he anticipated (space flights, helicopters, submarines, guided missiles, air conditioning, motion pictures), Verne was no less concerned with contemporary events, which inspired many of his other works and, through his humanistic and scientific optimism, represent the posi-tivistic spirit of his age. His inventions reveal, too, a sense of fantasy and subtle ambiguity, the relationship between space and time, matter and energy, with heroes who are more ambiguous than they appear. All these factors demand a new reading of his works, which are much less naive than they first appear.