The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (10 page)

I turned my attention to the typescripts. The first, I took it, was a direct translation from the French. I leafed through the pages until I found Chapter Seventeen, which recounted the balloonists’ flight over that region of Africa known as the Mountains of the Moon.

I picked up the second, bulkier script. Chapter seventeen was headed with the familiar:
The Germans Attack,
etc.

Joe Smith said, “When Verne handed in the first draft, Dr Fergusson consulted General Gordon, and several ministers in the cabinet. Only then did he rewrite chapters seventeen and twenty-five.” Joe Smith looked up at me, almost shamefacedly. “He swore me to secrecy. He said he was changing the story for the good of the Empire . . . And who was I, an uneducated manservant, to object?”

“I wouldn’t blame yourself, Joe. You were a dupe in the power of evil forces.”

“Lately, sir, I’ve been thinking, and looking at the state of the world, and I came to realize that what Dr Fergusson did was wrong.” He shook his head. “It’s too late to make reparations, sir, but the least I could do was ensure that the truth was known before I passed on.”

“The promulgation of truth is always honourable.”

“I’ve read your journalism. It strikes a chord. You write with
^-
integrity. I knew you were the man to approach.” “I’m flattered —”

Joe Smith smiled. “I’m an old man, sir. I want you to publish the truth, and damn those in power. They wouldn’t harm a citizen nearing ninety-six, would they?”

I felt my throat constrict. His faith in the honour of the ruling regime was at once terribly innocent and dangerously optimistic.

“I wouldn’t publish anything while you might suffer the consequences,” I said.

Joe poured me another whisky and we talked for a further hour.

“The other evening,” he said, “I was attempting to list the benefits that might have come from the war. I could think only of the improved transportation system!”

I smiled. “There have been medical advances, too. The cure of tuberculosis has saved many a civilian life, as well as those of soldiers returning from the war.”

I turned my attention to his bookshelves, stocked with the leather-bound volumes of Dickens and Trollope.

He noticed my interest. “I like a good novel, sir. Have you by any chance written a . . . ?”

I interrupted. “I have many a good idea,” I said, “but hardly time to commit them to paper. Perhaps one day, when the war is over . . .”

I noticed Palgrave’s Golden Treasury on his shelf, among other volumes. “You enjoy poetry too?”

“It is one of the consolations of old age,” Joe said. “My favourites are the War Poets, Owen, Graves, Sassoon, all dead now, alas.” He indicated a dozen back numbers of the
Adelphi.”
I enjoyed your poems, too, until the government closed down the magazine.”

“The dabbling of an amateur,” I said, “though I rather think I will be writing more verse at the front.”

Joe Smith looked shocked. “You’ve been called up?”

“I volunteered. I join my regiment in the morning.” I paused, and felt an explanation was due. “People often mistake patriotism for nationalism, Joe. I love England, but hate what she is becoming. I believe that we are facing a terrible evil in the new Germany that’s emerging from the old order, even if the war was originally based upon a lie. Mussolini is making pro-German noises, and the German minister of Foreign Affairs is an evil schemer called Hitler who’ll soon be in power. As reluctant as I am to pitch in my lot with the blimps in charge of this benighted land, Joe, I feel I must do my little bit.”

I finished my drink, consulted my watch, and made my excuses. “I have an early start . . .”

We stood and Joe showed me to the door. “It has been an honour talking to you, Mr Orwell,” he said.

“The honour has been mine, Joe.”

As I stepped out into the freezing night, Joe Smith quoted, “‘There may not always be scientists, but there will always be poets’ . . .”

I paused. “I don’t recognize the line.”

“From
Six Weeks in a Balloon,
sir.”

“Dr Fergusson wrote that?” I asked, surprised.

Joe Smith laughed. “The line is Jules Verne’s,” he said.

We shook hands, and I took my leave of the worthy Joe.

It was only a mile to the cheap hotel I used when in London, and I elected to walk. Turning my collar up against the wind, and murmuring to myself,
“There will always be poets . . .”
I squared my shoulders and set off into the dark and freezing night.

LONDRES AU XXI
^E
SIÈCLE by James Lovegrove

One of the great discoveries in recent years was of a lost novel by Jules Verne. Not a latter-day, unpublished one, but an early one.
Paris au XX
^e
Siècle
had been completed in 1863, so must have been his second novel, but was rejected by Hetzel partly because he believed the predictions would not be believed. Verne buried the manuscript in a safe and there it remained until discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. Here Verne really had let his imagination take free rein and his vision of the future is remarkably prescient. Perhaps it was because the work was rejected that Verne subsequently kept his stories within the close parameter of the plausible and as a consequence whilst we had more believable adventures we lost the true technological predictions. The book is as much a travelogue of the future as Verne’s later books became travelogues of the Earth in the present. As such it leaves itself open for satire, as the following story shows.

[Editor’s Note: With the discovery of Verne’s early “lost” novel of 1863,
Paris au XX
^e
siècle, came
the simultaneous discovery of a hitherto unknown sequel, judged to have been written in 1904, toward the end of the writer’s life and career. The event aroused little excitement in Vernian circles simply because, whereas
Paris . . .
was an intact manuscript of some 200 pages (complete with margin notes by Verve’s regular editor Hetzel), the manuscript of the belated sequel was burned — in all likelihood by Verne’s son Michel — and survives only as a set of charred fragments. The title page itself has been lost but we may reasonably infer from the content that the novel is called
Londres au XXI
^e
siècle (London in the Twenty-First Century).
Reinforcing this supposition is the fact that the story features the same protagonist as
Paris . . . ,
Michel Jérome Dufrénoy, still a poet but now an older and much sadder and wiser man than the self-martyring young firebrand of the previous novel. We present here the full extant text of
Londres . . . ,
commending it to readers not only for its many startlingly accurate prognostications, so typical of Verne, but for its brevity, so untypical of Verne.]

pp. 3-5

/”M Dufrénoy,” said Mr Smith the publisher, “I have run a thorough analysis of your verse collection on my totalizer and have been served with a statistical conclusion that backs to the hilt my professional instincts. The book has been subjected to every form of critical and linguistic computation available. Every word, every phrase, every rhyme, has been scrutinized by the machine and checked against the preferred standards. It is as if your poetry has been looked over by a thousand of the most median public minds, appraised by a thousand pairs of eyes that recognize what is ‘popular’, what will sell.”

“And the result?” said Dufrénoy, although the publisher’s tone of voice and down-turned lips had already given him his answer.

“Alas, the sales projections for the book are minimal. Indeed, the totalizer predicts that not only will we sell less than a dozen copies but those dozen copies will almost instantly find their way into second-hand bookshops, from where half of them will be sold again and half thrown away after sitting untouched on the shelves for a year. In effect, we will sell a negative number of copies, as it is predicted that the half-dozen volumes purchased from the secondhand shops will be bought by the very people who passed them on to the second-hand shops in the first place, forgetting they used to own this selfsame book a short while earlier. You see, the totalizer’s assessment of your poetry is that it neither captures the imagination nor lodges in the memory. Therefore, with regret, monsieur, I must tell you that Smith and Daughters respectfully decline to be your publisher.”

“But,” expostulated Dufrénoy, “you are saying that because your machine informs you my poetry will not sell, you are not prepared to attempt to sell it!?”

“Why does this come as a surprise to you?” replied Smith with a calm gesture. “You know that we in publishing are in a business, much as everyone is in a business these days. Who, in 2005,
can-not
afford to be in a business? Thus we employ statistical projection methods to enable us to judge what books we should and shouldn’t put out. Our margins for error are fine. We cannot financially afford the least slipup.”

“So you will publish only something which you know beforehand people will buy?”

“Is this so strange?”

“But you base your judgements on a mechanized distillation of public taste.”

“Exactly!” said Smith, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. “The totalizer is programmed to reflect nothing but the essence of the average man’s and woman’s literary likes, that which the busy person will choose to flick through while speeding to the office by pneumotube or the holidaymaker will idly read while lazing beneath the sun-like arc lights at an indoor vacation lido. Which is not to say, M Dufrénoy, that your poetry is bad. On the contrary, in my opinion it is excellent. Beautiful, limpid, elegant, exquisitely expressed, and above all original. ‘Original’, however, is what we cannot afford. ‘Original’ is the last thing anyone needs. ‘Original’, to put it finely, is not a marketable commodity.”

Dufrénoy was stunned, although in truth he had not expected any other response. It was, after all, his one hundred and fifteenth rejection by a publisher, and by now he was becoming/

pp. 17-18

/his twelve-year-old grandson Michael had come to visit, transported for the weekend from his home on the Kent marshes where he lived in one of the towns magnetically suspended above the floodplain, the “hovervilles” as they were known. Michael was a reluctant guest at his grandfather’s since the apartment was mean and dingy and situated near the base of a seventy-storey dwelling complex in run-down Muswell Hill. Little sunlight penetrated down through the urban canyons to the lower-level abodes, hence illumination down there had to be provided by sulphur-gas streetlamps which burned throughout the day as well as the night, shedding an unsteady bronze glow and a Hadean odour. Michael was accustomed to skies that reached from horizon to horizon and air that was constantly freshened by sea-borne breezes. The city, and especially his grandfather’s part of it, was to him a fusty, almost subterranean place, and his infrequent visits were conducted out of a sense of duty and with a greater than usual pre-adolescent surliness which even Dufrénoy’s most strenuous efforts at inculcating jollity could never dispel.

For the most part the boy sat and watched entertainments on Dufrénoy’s videophote set, a particular favourite of his being a song-competition presentation in which contestants with little or no musical talent vied to deliver the blandest possible rendition of some popular standard, their goal being to cause the least trouble to the ear of the listener and thus gain greater approbation than their rivals. Another of Michael’s preferred pastimes was a battery-powered toy, the Game Wallet, manufactured by the Worthington Novelty Company of Newcastle. This bauble consisted of a steel box with an inset window in which, by means of an ingenious development of Brownian motion, tens of thousands of phosphorescent vapour particles were manipulated electrostatically to form images. The images, controlled by magnetic cards purchased separately, presented the player with various games and puzzles to be solved, from relatively straightforward old standbys such as Hangman and Noughts and Crosses to more abstruse fare such as Moon Cannon Target Practice and Transglobal Travel Time Challenge.

Dufrénoy would look on with something close to despair as his grandson played with his Game Wallet often for hours at a stretch, mesmerised by the fizzing luminous patterns, thumbs manipulating the box’s brass control keys with blurring dextrous speed. How alien the boy seemed to him, a creature not merely from a different generation but from a different planet as it were! What did Michael know of books? Of literature, of culture? Very little, it appeared. Such things were not required learning at school any more, where the subjects of science and economics were pushed to the fore, to the detriment of all others. It pained Dufrénoy to think that all the/