Prescient and accounted for: a century after his death, novelist Jules Verne, who imagined Moon flight and deep-sea voyages, looks more prophetic than ever.(Tribute)(Biography)

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-MAR-05

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Jules Verne, the French science fiction pioneer who died 100 years ago this month, is typically viewed in this country as a lightweight. For that, Hollywood deserves some blame. The 1959 movie adaptation of Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is a "juvenile adventure maintaining a credible tone of silliness," one critic recently wrote, noting that the expedition "includes a goose called Gertrude."

Verne is the second-most-translated author on earth, after Agatha Christie, and it's not because his books are silly. For the record, the original expedition in Verne's 1864 Journey includes no barnyard animals. The novel remains one of the liveliest introductions to earth science, fossil biology and evolution in literature. And it's one of the earliest: it appeared just five years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

Best-known for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days, Verne has always been a major cultural figure in his native land. This month, his hometown of Amiens is scheduled to celebrate the centennial of his death with parades, exhibitions and literary conferences. Yet in the English-speaking world, Verne has been pigeonholed as merely a boys' adventure writer, even though he foresaw heavier-than-air flying machines and Moon voyages, and 20th-century pioneers such as the polar explorer Richard Byrd, the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and the astronaut Neil Armstrong have said that Verne's writings inspired them. But now Verne enthusiasts are pushing for a reconsideration of the writer as an influential literary figure whose 64 novels and stories (of admittedly varying quality) offer not only startling prophecies but also sharp commentary on the Europe and America of his day.

"There's a Jules Verne...

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