Verne, Jules

Verne, Jules. From the Earth to the Moon (1865); Around the Moon, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).

Gary K. Wolfe calls attention to these and other works by JV—available in numerous edns. and trans.—in which JV presents ever more secure interior (more or less mechanical) environments as the featured crafts' external environments become increasingly threatening (Wolfe 55-56) in The Known and the Unknown.[[1]]

See also Arthur B. Evans's discussion of the Nautilus, pp. 130-32 of "Jules Verne's Dream Machines: Technology and Transcendence".

For Verne's significance for future-war stories, see I. F. Clarke's Voices Prophesying War.

In his stories the machine becomes the object of fiction and the technologist is the Promethean genius who uses science to make the Victorian dream come true by the conquest of the ocean and of the air. [...] Before Verne the marvels of science had on occasions been incidental to stories of romance; but Verne gained a world-wide success by his ability to make technological achievements a subject for fiction. His heroes are scarcely real [... but at] best they are manifestations of tremendous energy — men who have learned how to control the great powers of nature. Their adventures are simply occasions for demonstrating man's new-found capacity to shape things to his will. [p. 66]

Verne is important, both because his work represents the high tide of European delight in the marvels and possibilities of science, and because he stands halfway between the earlier occasional and incidental treatment of future warfare in fiction and the full development on that theme in the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. (ch. 3, pp. 66-67)

RDE, Clarke quote, 10Dec20