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

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.

A DRAMA ON THE RAILWAY by Stephen Baxter

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:

“I stayed the night before in Liverpool, which was never so full of strangers. All the inns in the town were crowded to overflowing, and carriages stood in the streets, for there was no room in the stableyards.

“Thankful was I to stay in a tiny garret in the Ade1phi hotel thanks to the generosity of my friend, Miss— the renowned actress, of whom I was a guest that day, and of whose company of course my poor Father quite disapproved. It didn’t help that Father had been one of the most fervent opponents of the new railway in the first place, for he saw it as a threat to his own livelihood — and mine, for in the future, as I was an only child, I would inherit the Toll Gate Lodge which was our home, and my Father’s source of income. How right he was! — though, aged but twenty, I scarce saw it at the time.

“In the morning we all made to the railway yard. The engineers had assembled eight strings of carriages, with special colours to match the passengers’ tickets, and eight locomotives to pull ‘em, all steaming and panting like mighty horses. I peered at the engines, trying to pick out the bright blue flag that I knew would be borne by the famous
Rocket
itself.

“Of course no carriage was allowed to upstage the Prime Minister’s! It had Grecian scrolls and balustrades, and gilded pillars that maintained a canopy of rich crimson cloth. The interior had an ottoman seat. It was like a perfect little sitting room, except that it was a peculiar oblong shape, four times as long as it was wide, and it ran on eight large iron wheels!

“At precisely ten o’clock the Prime Minister himself drove up to the yard in the Marquis of Salisbury’s carriage, drawn by four horses. He was greeted by clapping and cheering, and a military band struck up
See the Conquering Hero Comes.
His train was to be pulled along by a locomotive called the Northumbrian, which was adorned by a bright lilac flag, and would be piloted by George Stephenson himself. The train consisted of just three carriages, in the first of which would ride the military band, the second the Prime Minister himself and his guests, and the third the railway directors and their guests — one of whom was me!

“I cannot describe my excitement as I clambered into the carriage, which was decked with silken streamers, a deep imperial purple. I admit I was callow enough to use my nail scissors to snip off a few inches of a pretty streamer which I tied up in my hair . . .”

I fingered the bit of ribbon that had bound up Lily’s manuscript, and wondered.

I grew up in a quiet cul-de-sac in a little outer-suburb village a few miles from Liverpool city centre, on the road to Manchester. The cul-de-sac emptied out southwards into the main road.

Behind the houses ran a railway embankment. It cut straight past the northern end of the road, running dead straight west to east, paralleling the main road in its path from Liverpool to Manchester. We kids were strictly banned from ever trying to find a way to the railway embankment, or to climb its grassy slopes. But we did know there was a disused tunnel under the embankment behind one of the back gardens, from which, our legends had it, robbers would periodically emerge.

When I was small, steam trains still ran along the line. Great white clouds would climb into the air, and my mother would rush out to save’ her washing from the soot. The trains were always a part of our lives, sweeping across the sky like low-flying planes. Their noise didn’t bother us; it was too grand to be irritating, like the weather.