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Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece

450 points by vo2maxer 7y ago

esch89 7y ago
That's amazing!
mynegation 7y ago
Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island" was how I got interested in tech around the age of 6. I devoured all of his books that I could find after that and it was my introduction to geology ("Journey to the Center of the Earth"), geography ("In search of the castaways", "Around the world in eighty days"), oceanology ("Twenty thousand leagues under the sea"), Astronautics ("From the Earth to the Moon", "Around the moon"), dystopian/utopian world building ("The Begum's fortune") and so on and so forth. EDIT: fixed the name of the book, thank you bradyd.
- bradyd 7y ago
  I believe you actually mean "The Mysterious Island". I read this book last year and was amazed by the level of technical detail.
- nabla9 7y ago
  As a kid when I learned to read I soon devoured trough books in children section basically reading all books from one author, then moving to the next. First Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and Mars series. Then all Jules Verne books available. Verne is technically very detailed. They were great reading experiences. I can still remember where the books were placed in the library.
  - ZguideZ 7y ago
    I did the same. I got sidetracked with Tolkien and the Jim Kjelgaard Big Red books as well.
  - ZguideZ 7y ago
    It's funny, kids don't get to experience the magic of libraries like we did. I'm a 71 model and I think those that came after the 70s pretty much didn't get to experience it.
    - irrational 7y ago
      Depends on the parents. My kids biggest complaint about the library is that they are only allowed to checkout 100 books at a time.
      - jfim 7y ago
        Out of curiosity, what's the scenario in which one would hit that limit? When I was a kid, the limit was something like five books, and we'd just go to the library often.
        irrational 7y ago
        When we go to the library (about once a week), the kids haul out at least that many books. They are all voracious readers and can go through 100 books in the blink of an eye.
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      There are still great public libraries in many parts of the world (and certainly all over the USA). Why wouldn’t kids get to experience them?
      - ZguideZ 7y ago
        The magic of libraries was discovering a new section of the dewey decimal system, figuring out that other books you liked might be next to the book you looked up in the card catalog, and escaping to worlds you could never see if not for your imagination and the printed word. Now you just google it, find pictures, read everything about it on the wikis, look at a live cam or webcam of the place, use google earth to wander around, read about all the negative things about the hero you just discovered etc. It's not that the libraries aren't there - it's that the lack of other things made them magical.
- nsajko 7y ago
  Ditto, but I think it would be good to accompany the book with some testimonies by/about people who got hurt/killed by chemicals. I remember getting quite giddy about the possibility to get some nitroglycerin, nitric acid, etc. from reading The Mysterious Island; and I was lucky to lack the resourcefulness needed to actually obtain the nasty stuff. If the young reader could get a good chemistry teacher as a tutor, though; the possibilities turn from grim to great.
- irrational 7y ago
  For me it was the old Tom Swift books that I found at my grandparent's house. Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster, Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter, Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire, Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon, etc. https://www.orderofbooks.com/characters/tom-swift/ https://www.orderofbooks.com/characters/tom-swift/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=tom+swift https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=tom+swift
  - jvanvleet 7y ago
    Mine too. Tom Swift and the Bookmobile that brought them changed my life. It also had a few of the "new" Tom Swift adventures and I later learned there was an "old" series that start with Tom Swift and his Wireless Message and Tom Swift and his Electronic Rifle.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    Unrelated fact: Tom Swift is why tasers are called tasers. Their inventor, Jack Cover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cover), named them by acronymizing "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" (TASER).
    - fouc 7y ago
      That's a ridiculously cool fact.
  - T-hawk 7y ago
    Wow, same here. My family happened to find a big set of that same Tom Swift series at a yard sale when I was about 12. They were constantly my most-read books through middle and high school, and may well have had something to do with going into tech as a career.
  - wikibob 7y ago
    Me too! I loved those books when I was young. I'd forgotten about them.
  - btown 7y ago
- mynegation 7y ago
  EDIT2: Basically any government that wants to improve investment into STEM should start by including those and similar books into the school reading program.
  - wiseleo 7y ago
    You're right. Compare that to the random classics in which you have no interest on which you have to write a report.
    - pilsetnieks 7y ago
      Might not those become a subject to tedious report writing and become disliked by young children as well? I bet there are people who like those current classics, too – people who were not exposed to them in school, or who overcame their association with the drudgery of schoolwork.
- pi-rat 7y ago
  Probably my favorite book as a child, I probably read that thing 100 times.
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    Same here. I've read that book probably at least 20 times in my life, and I expect I'll read it at least a couple more if I live long enough.
- ZguideZ 7y ago
  Don't forget an introduction to Chemistry in Mysterious Island as well. Fun fact, The Mysterious Island was the basis of the series LOST.
  - kpozin 7y ago
    Interesting, I haven't been able to find any acknowledged connections between the two. Do you have any references you could share? The two works were linked in my mind back when I was watching Lost, and my impressions of them were very similar -- in both The Mysterious Island and Lost, there were fascinating mysteries built up in the beginning, but the eventually revealed explanations could not live up to those expectations.
    - ZguideZ 7y ago
      I wrote my undergrad thesis back in 08 about how Lost was breaking barriers between real world and fiction - part of that was interviewing cast, crew, and writers. On my interview with Cuse and Abrams it came up as the starting point - castaways, mysterious cave, submarine, etc etc. I'll see if I can dig it up. There was no way they could live up to the expectations - part of the problem was that they kept trying to tease the fans with the future and the fans kept guessing right so they kept trying to change things to stay ahead and as a result - painted themselves in a corner. They did some amazingly interesting things though - creating events, products, and fake companies in the real world to enhance the story telling in the fictional one. Ground breaking. A big part of my thesis was how a shared interest in the show was creating real world friendships from online fanboards - something that sounds 'so what?' now, but that was mind blowing back then. People would meet on the boards and then travel to Hawaii, meet up, go to the set locations, even stay together - based on a passion for the 'mysteries' the show created.
- tigershark 7y ago
  I decided to become an engineer after reading the mysterious island. Although I was somewhat older, probably 10-12. Journey to the centre of the earth was actually the first book that I read when I was probably 7, and I really enjoyed it.
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  Same impact of "Mysterious Island" on me. It's the original "competence/achievement" book. Though I've never fully recovered from the reality check than a real engineer isn't as broadly competent and knowledgeable as Cyrus Smith. (even American ones ;) )
amerine 7y ago
Is there a collection of fictional ‘"documentational" illustrations like "the map of the Polar regions (hand-drawn by Verne himself)’ illustrations out there? I love that hand-drawn style and often want to find examples for tattoos.
- durkie 7y ago
  You're in luck! This week, via kottke.org: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/ https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/
julienchastang 7y ago
I read a number of Jules Vernes novels recently. The pattern is a similar one where he describes the known science of the time in quite a bit of accurate detail. Starting with that as the premise, he then runs with the idea to create the plot. The result is both science and science fiction. My favorite is still "Around the World in Eighty Days". A Jules Verne novel was rediscovered not long ago: "Paris in the Twentieth Century".
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  That really is what science fiction is supposed to be, IMHO. You take a scientific or technological concept (or set of concepts... or perhaps a near-at-hand extrapolation of a concept... like air-independent propulsion for the Nautilus) and explore it and its consequences thoroughly. Seveneves explores social media and swarm robots (and non-fantastical alternatives-to-chemical-rocket-propulsion), for instance (and later, epigenetics). Arrival explores a hypothesis from the science of linguistics, for instance (I like this one a lot because it strays from the usual "hard" sciences or anthropological rehashing of European conquest, etc, of space operas). Space operas are really just fantasy in space. Fun, grand epics, but not science fiction (exception would be in The Last Jedi, the use of the hyperdrive as an extremely powerful weapon... exploring the consequences of any kind of propulsion system capable of traveling at extreme speeds... of course, everyone--except me--hated that one because, we all agree, Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction).
- abnry 7y ago
  I still get goosebumps remembering the scene in "journey to the center of the earth" when they see a human figure lumbering across the cavern. Paris in the 20th century was also really cool to read. Almost every Jules Verne book has this unbridled optimism (especially pronounced in the American characters). But this book is dark. I kinda liked it for that. After reading so many Jules Verne books as a teenager, they all started to feel the same.
crmrc114 7y ago
Holy cow, Looks like I need to expand the library.. Somehow I am unable to quickly find a complete collection in print. I will have to dig to see what volumes would be required to collect all of his work. Plenty of ebook collections however if that is your style.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Beware: AFAIK many of the most commonly-available English translations are not very good. It's a pretty common problem with 19th-century foreign language literature generally, in fact. The public domain's full of translations that are simply poor, and/or retain a lot of cruft from 19th or early 20th century English style that aren't vital to conveying the meaning or tone of the original work, and so are less approachable to the modern reader, to no real purpose. Probably any big ebook collections you find are going to be re-packagings of translations of this sort, from Project Gutenberg or wherever. His French isn't too tough if you read that, but some of the English translations you see in the wild—oof.
  - mamcx 7y ago
    Sound like a niche business opportunity?
  - alex_c 7y ago
    Are there specific English translations that are good and reasonably modern? As a kid I read Jules Verne translated in my native language, and loved it. Not sure where I would start to acquire his work in English.
James_Henry 7y ago
I would love to re-read some of these books with the original illustrations now, something I didn't have the first time I read them. Does anyone know of good copies of English translations that preserve the original illustrations? The easiest to find ones on Amazon (from SeaWolf Press) don't look to be the best printing.
- rst 7y ago
  Unfortunately, Verne was not well served by his contemporary translators -- among other things, there are technical descriptions, or episodes poking fun at the English or Americans, which somehow just never showed up in the English translations. There are newer translations that do a much better job -- but those are still within copyright, and so not cheap. (This addresses only the text; the illustrations are a significant extra wrinkle.)
  - James_Henry 7y ago
    Guess I'll have to learn French!
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    > newer translations that do a much better job Do you have recommendations?
    - Reason077 7y ago
      Jules Verne Translations That Don't Stink: https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translations-that-dont-stink.html https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translati...
komali2 7y ago
> Human knowledge of the universe has widened and deepened since Verne's day, but for sheer intellectual and adventurous wonder about what that universe might contain, has any writer, from any era or land, outdone him since? No, I don't think so. It seems sci fi went the way of the graduate thesis: hyper specialized, hyper focused. I think this might have been out of necessity. Maybe Stephenson has come close though. He's covered nonfictional history, space travel (anathem, seven eves), colonization of Earth orbit and the moon (seven eves), generational space travel (anathem), multiple universe theories (anathem), and to come back down to earth, cryptography (cryptonomicon, reamde, fall), AI (diamond age), wetware hacking (snow crash), VR (snow crash, fall), post mortem VR (fall), nanotech (fall, diamond age), and layered simulated universes (fall). So beyond Stephenson I don't think anyone comes close to fantastical exploration at the level of Verne. Crichton didn't. Watts is highly focused in biology. Banks deals with cosmic horror, AI, and a touch of multiverse. Doctorow is fantastic "realistic near future" exploration but he never takes us to space, and I don't think he really even explores AI.
- nsajko 7y ago
  With names aready being dropped, here are some oldies: Clarke, Asimov, Stanislav Lem.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Ah, you're right, Asimov definitely tops the list. He explored the fuck out of AI and then jumped straight into the question of whether human psychology is deterministic. Space travel, galaxy colonization, hell even telekinesis and other wild shit. I think he doesn't have the breadth of topic of Neal Stephenson but he's definitely prolific.
    - jfengel 7y ago
      His nonfiction work is even broader: he wrote books on history, the Bible, and Shakespeare, as well as every kind of science. Not always very well, mind you: my youthful adoration of his breadth has been replaced by am embarrassed coughing as I realize just how far out of his depth he often was. Still, who I am today owes a lot to him.
CWuestefeld 7y ago
recapturing the 'feel' of Verne’s socio-historical milieu and evoking that sense of faraway exoticism and futuristic awe It's my understanding that the original French texts (not just the illustrations) are much richer in that socio-historical stuff. The English translations that we have are unfortunately dumbed-down to YA-friendly adventure stories. I'd love to see translations that more faithfully capture the full complexity of the works.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
"The Mysterious Island" is his best book, and it had aged way much better than any of his other novels. Probably because in this one Verne didn't try to venture far from the realm of possible, giving Cyrus Smith a very advanced set of skills and deep knowledge of contemporary sciences, but abstained from introducing non-existing technologies, besides a brief appearance of Nemo & "Nautilus"
abecedarius 7y ago
If you read French, there's a convenient Kindle edition of his collected works for three bucks. Unfortunately the illustrations there are comparable to postage stamps.
- hallidave 7y ago
  Also this, for free: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Jules_Verne https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Jules_Verne
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I did not know that, and I have read a few of his books. One of the reasons that I like HN, is because of occasional gems like this. Thanks!
kazinator 7y ago
A movie called Vynález zkázy ("the destructive contraption") based on severa of Verne's works was made in Czechoslovakia in 1958, combining animations based on line art from some of Verne's books with live acting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_World_of_Jules_Verne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_World_of_Jules_Ve... It won the Grand Prix at the International Film Festival that was held as part of Expo 58 in Brussels. Czechs and Slovaks can't get enough Verne. Check out all the translations of The Mysterious Island between 1878 and 2018. Some of the translators did it several times again, one of them six times. https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajupln%C3%BD_ostrov#%C4%8Cesk%C3%A1_vyd%C3%A1n%C3%AD https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajupln%C3%BD_ostrov#%C4%8Cesk...
- paganel 7y ago
  Jules Verne was generally seen pretty well in the former communist countries, my HN/reddit nickname is taken from a Soviet TV series based on one of Jules Verne's books [1]. Mind you, I didn't even live in the former Soviet Union, but when I first saw a glimpse of Verne's universe as a 7-year old kid I was hooked for life. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088635/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088635/
ElFitz 7y ago
Jules Vernes is one of my favorite authors. He dreamt big, wild (Michel Strogoff), and daringly (From the Earth to the Moon), ranging from adventure (Around the World in Eighty Days) to scientific anticipation (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), to sheer madness (Robur the Conqueror). My favorite quote of his is quite revealing of the man's character: "Tout ce qui est dans la limite du possible doit être et sera accompli". Which I would roughly translate as "All that is within the limits of the possible must and will be accomplished".
- thrower123 7y ago
  Reading Robur the Conqueror was quite a trip when I first picked it up from Project Gutenberg. It made me suspect that the versions of the more well-known novels like 20,000 Leagues, Earth to the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth that I'd read from the shelves of my school library had been considerably bowdlerized.
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    The initial English translations of Verne _were_ considerably bowdlerized, sometimes with large chunks cut out or summarized in the interests of making them more "kids books" than adult ones. There are some modern translations that might be better on this front. Edit: Mentioned elsewhere in this thread: <https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translations-that-dont-stink.html> https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translati..., which I have now bookmarked!
    - lordfrikk 7y ago
      Your link has a ">" at the end which makes it not work.
      - bzbarsky 7y ago
        Ugh, I keep forgetting that HN's URL delimiter handling is completely broken.... Unfortunately I can't edit my comment at this point, but the link should have been https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translations-that-dont-stink.html https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translati...
microtherion 7y ago
I enjoyed many of Verne's books as a child, so last year I tried reading some to my children. I thought the writing held up quite well (compared to e.g. Karl May, another author I loved reading when I was young): In particular, Verne is able to deploy ethnic caricatures without coming across as bigoted: > What can be added to these figures, so eloquent in themselves? Nothing. So the following calculation obtained by the statistician Pitcairn will be admitted without contestation: by dividing the number of victims fallen under the projectiles by that of the members of the Gun Club, he found that each one of them had killed, on his own account, an average of two thousand three hundred and seventy-five men and a fraction. > By considering such a result it will be seen that the single preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity philanthropically, and the perfecting of firearms considered as instruments of civilisation. It was a company of Exterminating Angels, at bottom the best fellows in the world.
- bouvin 7y ago
  I agree in general (adored Verne as child, and has enjoyed many of his books as an adult), but I would caution against reading Off on a Comet, as that contains pure, unadulterated, mean-spirited anti-semitism. At least that does not come to the fore in any other book of his that I have read.
f4stjack 7y ago
Oh man, I recently finished some of his novels and it is astounding to see the optimism he had for us, considering he was writing in a world before any world wars happened. I really would like to live in a Vernian world where people are mostly good and rationalism wins the day. But I also would like to live in Discworld (maybe except Fourecks) so caveat emptor! :'D
- erk__ 7y ago
  You should try and read the dystopian novel he wrote, it was first published in 1994. It paints a very bleak dystopian picture of Paris, it is an interesting contrast to his other works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century
acabal 7y ago
Shameless plug, we have a few Verne books downloadable for free as high-quality ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne/ https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne/ If you'd like to produce some new ones for everyone to read, get in touch at our mailing list!
nathell 7y ago
Ah, Verne. Brings back childhood memories. I consumed the entire Verne that was in my primary school library, maybe 15 novels in total. "The Mysterious Island" and "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" were one of the first books I read in English translations (my mother tongue is Polish), around the age of 13. Good times.
8bitsrule 7y ago
This story of the (usually serialized first) books' publishing history is interesting. (Many also had special 'Christmas editions'.) "... if variations in binding color are considered, more than 4000 different combinations of text and binding were published between 1866 and 1919." http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_1/harpold/ http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_1/harpold/
ZguideZ 7y ago
I love this. I ate these up as a kid and looked for the connections.
mirimir 7y ago
All here for free: https://www.epubbooks.com/series/1-voyages-extraordinaires https://www.epubbooks.com/series/1-voyages-extraordinaires Registration required, though.
- misterprime 7y ago
  And here without registration requirements: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/60 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/60
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Gutenberg blocks German IPs.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Here's why: https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html PGLAF has taken an extreme position. In order to comply with a German court ruling about copyright infringement, it's made the entire site unavailable to German IP addresses. That would be like Google entirely cutting off the EU over "Right to be Forgotten" stuff. Google would never do that, because money. But PGLAF isn't about money. So anyway, I'm on PGLAF's side here, if anyone cares.
      - kwhitefoot 7y ago
        > But PGLAF isn't about money. But the decision to block German IP addresses /is/ about money. They made the point that it would be more expensive for PG to arrange to block specific works and that they simply don't have a budget for it. See https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html Edit: formatting.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  User: bugmenot@mailinator.com Password: bugmenot I downloaded Five Weeks in a Balloon and noticed that it does not credit a translator but does claim copyright. Seems a bit odd.
shakna 7y ago
Well, there's a number of people plugging their ebook sites of some of them easier to get books. As a slightly different plug, "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" from 1916 [0] is worth a glance. It's a silent film, so some people might not be able to watch it today, but is has some curiosities to it. It was the first feature filmed underwater, using a simple tube and mirror arrangement that most people here could come up with. It also had tons of extravagant sets, and so on, making it incredibly expensive for the era. Literature wise, it combines "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" and "The Mysterious Island", in a fairly faithful way. [0] https://sixteenmm.org/s/leaguesunderthesea_1916 https://sixteenmm.org/s/leaguesunderthesea_1916 Note: If it wasn't obvious from above, that's a link to something I run.
JoeDaDude 7y ago
In Prophets of Science Fiction [1], the TV Series about SF authors, they portrayed Jules Verne as disillusioned and depressed in his later years. They said he burned all his correspondence and in despair wrote his last work, Paris in the Twentieth Century [2], a somewhat dystopian novel in which art is no longer valued. It is such a contrast to his other novels I have to wonder how accurate this portrayal is, whether it was greatly exaggerated in some way. Can anyone comment on Verne's latter days? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_of_Science_Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_of_Science_Fiction [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century
quotemstr 7y ago
It's amazingly difficult to predict which of one's efforts is going to "stick". I've put years of work into things that ended up being total duds. I've also spent a few evenings here and there writing things off-the-cuff that ended up becoming famous. Just as we're lucky if we think one truly novel thought in all our lives, we're amazingly lucky if one part of our effort out of 54 becomes part of humanity's collective inheritance. Jules Verne was lucky several times over.
giorgioz 7y ago
>Human knowledge of the universe has widened and deepened since Verne's day, but for sheer intellectual and adventurous wonder about what that universe might contain, has any writer, from any era or land, outdone him since? Yes, we can safely say science fiction writers after Jules Verne has outdone him. Safely. I believe Jules Verne himself reading science fiction that came after himself would say so himself. Believing that one moment in the past was better than all the future moments is a classic form of romantic nostalgia in the style of Midnight in Paris of Woody Allen. I believe Jules Verne books were incredibile for the time and inspired millions of readers. Believing that Jules Verne was the apex though is very sad. It's absolutely the opposite of what Jules Verne was. Jules Verne was a dreamer believing in progress. When you believe that the Jules Verne was the apex of science fiction progress you are spitting in the face of his optimism.
nicodds 7y ago
Almost like Donald Knuth's TAOCP!

450 points by vo2maxer 7y ago

That's amazing!

Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island" was how I got interested in tech around the age of 6. I devoured all of his books that I could find after that and it was my introduction to geology ("Journey to the Center of the Earth"), geography ("In search of the castaways", "Around the world in eighty days"), oceanology ("Twenty thousand leagues under the sea"), Astronautics ("From the Earth to the Moon", "Around the moon"), dystopian/utopian world building ("The Begum's fortune") and so on and so forth. EDIT: fixed the name of the book, thank you bradyd.

bradyd 7y ago
I believe you actually mean "The Mysterious Island". I read this book last year and was amazed by the level of technical detail.
nabla9 7y ago
As a kid when I learned to read I soon devoured trough books in children section basically reading all books from one author, then moving to the next. First Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and Mars series. Then all Jules Verne books available. Verne is technically very detailed. They were great reading experiences. I can still remember where the books were placed in the library.
- ZguideZ 7y ago
  I did the same. I got sidetracked with Tolkien and the Jim Kjelgaard Big Red books as well.
- ZguideZ 7y ago
  It's funny, kids don't get to experience the magic of libraries like we did. I'm a 71 model and I think those that came after the 70s pretty much didn't get to experience it.
  - irrational 7y ago
    Depends on the parents. My kids biggest complaint about the library is that they are only allowed to checkout 100 books at a time.
    - jfim 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, what's the scenario in which one would hit that limit? When I was a kid, the limit was something like five books, and we'd just go to the library often.
      - irrational 7y ago
        When we go to the library (about once a week), the kids haul out at least that many books. They are all voracious readers and can go through 100 books in the blink of an eye.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    There are still great public libraries in many parts of the world (and certainly all over the USA). Why wouldn’t kids get to experience them?
    - ZguideZ 7y ago
      The magic of libraries was discovering a new section of the dewey decimal system, figuring out that other books you liked might be next to the book you looked up in the card catalog, and escaping to worlds you could never see if not for your imagination and the printed word. Now you just google it, find pictures, read everything about it on the wikis, look at a live cam or webcam of the place, use google earth to wander around, read about all the negative things about the hero you just discovered etc. It's not that the libraries aren't there - it's that the lack of other things made them magical.
nsajko 7y ago
Ditto, but I think it would be good to accompany the book with some testimonies by/about people who got hurt/killed by chemicals. I remember getting quite giddy about the possibility to get some nitroglycerin, nitric acid, etc. from reading The Mysterious Island; and I was lucky to lack the resourcefulness needed to actually obtain the nasty stuff. If the young reader could get a good chemistry teacher as a tutor, though; the possibilities turn from grim to great.
irrational 7y ago
For me it was the old Tom Swift books that I found at my grandparent's house. Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster, Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter, Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire, Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon, etc. https://www.orderofbooks.com/characters/tom-swift/ https://www.orderofbooks.com/characters/tom-swift/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=tom+swift https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=tom+swift
- jvanvleet 7y ago
  Mine too. Tom Swift and the Bookmobile that brought them changed my life. It also had a few of the "new" Tom Swift adventures and I later learned there was an "old" series that start with Tom Swift and his Wireless Message and Tom Swift and his Electronic Rifle.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Unrelated fact: Tom Swift is why tasers are called tasers. Their inventor, Jack Cover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cover), named them by acronymizing "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" (TASER).
  - fouc 7y ago
    That's a ridiculously cool fact.
- T-hawk 7y ago
  Wow, same here. My family happened to find a big set of that same Tom Swift series at a yard sale when I was about 12. They were constantly my most-read books through middle and high school, and may well have had something to do with going into tech as a career.
- wikibob 7y ago
  Me too! I loved those books when I was young. I'd forgotten about them.
- btown 7y ago
mynegation 7y ago
EDIT2: Basically any government that wants to improve investment into STEM should start by including those and similar books into the school reading program.
- wiseleo 7y ago
  You're right. Compare that to the random classics in which you have no interest on which you have to write a report.
  - pilsetnieks 7y ago
    Might not those become a subject to tedious report writing and become disliked by young children as well? I bet there are people who like those current classics, too – people who were not exposed to them in school, or who overcame their association with the drudgery of schoolwork.
pi-rat 7y ago
Probably my favorite book as a child, I probably read that thing 100 times.
- mindcrime 7y ago
  Same here. I've read that book probably at least 20 times in my life, and I expect I'll read it at least a couple more if I live long enough.
ZguideZ 7y ago
Don't forget an introduction to Chemistry in Mysterious Island as well. Fun fact, The Mysterious Island was the basis of the series LOST.
- kpozin 7y ago
  Interesting, I haven't been able to find any acknowledged connections between the two. Do you have any references you could share? The two works were linked in my mind back when I was watching Lost, and my impressions of them were very similar -- in both The Mysterious Island and Lost, there were fascinating mysteries built up in the beginning, but the eventually revealed explanations could not live up to those expectations.
  - ZguideZ 7y ago
    I wrote my undergrad thesis back in 08 about how Lost was breaking barriers between real world and fiction - part of that was interviewing cast, crew, and writers. On my interview with Cuse and Abrams it came up as the starting point - castaways, mysterious cave, submarine, etc etc. I'll see if I can dig it up. There was no way they could live up to the expectations - part of the problem was that they kept trying to tease the fans with the future and the fans kept guessing right so they kept trying to change things to stay ahead and as a result - painted themselves in a corner. They did some amazingly interesting things though - creating events, products, and fake companies in the real world to enhance the story telling in the fictional one. Ground breaking. A big part of my thesis was how a shared interest in the show was creating real world friendships from online fanboards - something that sounds 'so what?' now, but that was mind blowing back then. People would meet on the boards and then travel to Hawaii, meet up, go to the set locations, even stay together - based on a passion for the 'mysteries' the show created.
tigershark 7y ago
I decided to become an engineer after reading the mysterious island. Although I was somewhat older, probably 10-12. Journey to the centre of the earth was actually the first book that I read when I was probably 7, and I really enjoyed it.
AceJohnny2 7y ago
Same impact of "Mysterious Island" on me. It's the original "competence/achievement" book. Though I've never fully recovered from the reality check than a real engineer isn't as broadly competent and knowledgeable as Cyrus Smith. (even American ones ;) )

amerine 7y ago

Is there a collection of fictional ‘"documentational" illustrations like "the map of the Polar regions (hand-drawn by Verne himself)’ illustrations out there? I love that hand-drawn style and often want to find examples for tattoos.

durkie 7y ago
You're in luck! This week, via kottke.org: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/ https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/

julienchastang 7y ago

I read a number of Jules Vernes novels recently. The pattern is a similar one where he describes the known science of the time in quite a bit of accurate detail. Starting with that as the premise, he then runs with the idea to create the plot. The result is both science and science fiction. My favorite is still "Around the World in Eighty Days". A Jules Verne novel was rediscovered not long ago: "Paris in the Twentieth Century".

Robotbeat 7y ago
That really is what science fiction is supposed to be, IMHO. You take a scientific or technological concept (or set of concepts... or perhaps a near-at-hand extrapolation of a concept... like air-independent propulsion for the Nautilus) and explore it and its consequences thoroughly. Seveneves explores social media and swarm robots (and non-fantastical alternatives-to-chemical-rocket-propulsion), for instance (and later, epigenetics). Arrival explores a hypothesis from the science of linguistics, for instance (I like this one a lot because it strays from the usual "hard" sciences or anthropological rehashing of European conquest, etc, of space operas). Space operas are really just fantasy in space. Fun, grand epics, but not science fiction (exception would be in The Last Jedi, the use of the hyperdrive as an extremely powerful weapon... exploring the consequences of any kind of propulsion system capable of traveling at extreme speeds... of course, everyone--except me--hated that one because, we all agree, Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction).
abnry 7y ago
I still get goosebumps remembering the scene in "journey to the center of the earth" when they see a human figure lumbering across the cavern. Paris in the 20th century was also really cool to read. Almost every Jules Verne book has this unbridled optimism (especially pronounced in the American characters). But this book is dark. I kinda liked it for that. After reading so many Jules Verne books as a teenager, they all started to feel the same.

crmrc114 7y ago

Holy cow, Looks like I need to expand the library.. Somehow I am unable to quickly find a complete collection in print. I will have to dig to see what volumes would be required to collect all of his work. Plenty of ebook collections however if that is your style.

karatestomp 7y ago
Beware: AFAIK many of the most commonly-available English translations are not very good. It's a pretty common problem with 19th-century foreign language literature generally, in fact. The public domain's full of translations that are simply poor, and/or retain a lot of cruft from 19th or early 20th century English style that aren't vital to conveying the meaning or tone of the original work, and so are less approachable to the modern reader, to no real purpose. Probably any big ebook collections you find are going to be re-packagings of translations of this sort, from Project Gutenberg or wherever. His French isn't too tough if you read that, but some of the English translations you see in the wild—oof.
- mamcx 7y ago
  Sound like a niche business opportunity?
- alex_c 7y ago
  Are there specific English translations that are good and reasonably modern? As a kid I read Jules Verne translated in my native language, and loved it. Not sure where I would start to acquire his work in English.

James_Henry 7y ago

I would love to re-read some of these books with the original illustrations now, something I didn't have the first time I read them. Does anyone know of good copies of English translations that preserve the original illustrations? The easiest to find ones on Amazon (from SeaWolf Press) don't look to be the best printing.

rst 7y ago
Unfortunately, Verne was not well served by his contemporary translators -- among other things, there are technical descriptions, or episodes poking fun at the English or Americans, which somehow just never showed up in the English translations. There are newer translations that do a much better job -- but those are still within copyright, and so not cheap. (This addresses only the text; the illustrations are a significant extra wrinkle.)
- James_Henry 7y ago
  Guess I'll have to learn French!
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > newer translations that do a much better job Do you have recommendations?
  - Reason077 7y ago
    Jules Verne Translations That Don't Stink: https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translations-that-dont-stink.html https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translati...

komali2 7y ago

> Human knowledge of the universe has widened and deepened since Verne's day, but for sheer intellectual and adventurous wonder about what that universe might contain, has any writer, from any era or land, outdone him since? No, I don't think so. It seems sci fi went the way of the graduate thesis: hyper specialized, hyper focused. I think this might have been out of necessity. Maybe Stephenson has come close though. He's covered nonfictional history, space travel (anathem, seven eves), colonization of Earth orbit and the moon (seven eves), generational space travel (anathem), multiple universe theories (anathem), and to come back down to earth, cryptography (cryptonomicon, reamde, fall), AI (diamond age), wetware hacking (snow crash), VR (snow crash, fall), post mortem VR (fall), nanotech (fall, diamond age), and layered simulated universes (fall). So beyond Stephenson I don't think anyone comes close to fantastical exploration at the level of Verne. Crichton didn't. Watts is highly focused in biology. Banks deals with cosmic horror, AI, and a touch of multiverse. Doctorow is fantastic "realistic near future" exploration but he never takes us to space, and I don't think he really even explores AI.

nsajko 7y ago
With names aready being dropped, here are some oldies: Clarke, Asimov, Stanislav Lem.
- komali2 7y ago
  Ah, you're right, Asimov definitely tops the list. He explored the fuck out of AI and then jumped straight into the question of whether human psychology is deterministic. Space travel, galaxy colonization, hell even telekinesis and other wild shit. I think he doesn't have the breadth of topic of Neal Stephenson but he's definitely prolific.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    His nonfiction work is even broader: he wrote books on history, the Bible, and Shakespeare, as well as every kind of science. Not always very well, mind you: my youthful adoration of his breadth has been replaced by am embarrassed coughing as I realize just how far out of his depth he often was. Still, who I am today owes a lot to him.

CWuestefeld 7y ago

recapturing the 'feel' of Verne’s socio-historical milieu and evoking that sense of faraway exoticism and futuristic awe It's my understanding that the original French texts (not just the illustrations) are much richer in that socio-historical stuff. The English translations that we have are unfortunately dumbed-down to YA-friendly adventure stories. I'd love to see translations that more faithfully capture the full complexity of the works.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

"The Mysterious Island" is his best book, and it had aged way much better than any of his other novels. Probably because in this one Verne didn't try to venture far from the realm of possible, giving Cyrus Smith a very advanced set of skills and deep knowledge of contemporary sciences, but abstained from introducing non-existing technologies, besides a brief appearance of Nemo & "Nautilus"

abecedarius 7y ago

If you read French, there's a convenient Kindle edition of his collected works for three bucks. Unfortunately the illustrations there are comparable to postage stamps.

hallidave 7y ago
Also this, for free: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Jules_Verne https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Jules_Verne

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I did not know that, and I have read a few of his books. One of the reasons that I like HN, is because of occasional gems like this. Thanks!

kazinator 7y ago

A movie called Vynález zkázy ("the destructive contraption") based on severa of Verne's works was made in Czechoslovakia in 1958, combining animations based on line art from some of Verne's books with live acting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_World_of_Jules_Verne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_World_of_Jules_Ve... It won the Grand Prix at the International Film Festival that was held as part of Expo 58 in Brussels. Czechs and Slovaks can't get enough Verne. Check out all the translations of The Mysterious Island between 1878 and 2018. Some of the translators did it several times again, one of them six times. https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajupln%C3%BD_ostrov#%C4%8Cesk%C3%A1_vyd%C3%A1n%C3%AD https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajupln%C3%BD_ostrov#%C4%8Cesk...

paganel 7y ago
Jules Verne was generally seen pretty well in the former communist countries, my HN/reddit nickname is taken from a Soviet TV series based on one of Jules Verne's books [1]. Mind you, I didn't even live in the former Soviet Union, but when I first saw a glimpse of Verne's universe as a 7-year old kid I was hooked for life. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088635/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088635/

ElFitz 7y ago

Jules Vernes is one of my favorite authors. He dreamt big, wild (Michel Strogoff), and daringly (From the Earth to the Moon), ranging from adventure (Around the World in Eighty Days) to scientific anticipation (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), to sheer madness (Robur the Conqueror). My favorite quote of his is quite revealing of the man's character: "Tout ce qui est dans la limite du possible doit être et sera accompli". Which I would roughly translate as "All that is within the limits of the possible must and will be accomplished".

thrower123 7y ago
Reading Robur the Conqueror was quite a trip when I first picked it up from Project Gutenberg. It made me suspect that the versions of the more well-known novels like 20,000 Leagues, Earth to the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth that I'd read from the shelves of my school library had been considerably bowdlerized.
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  The initial English translations of Verne _were_ considerably bowdlerized, sometimes with large chunks cut out or summarized in the interests of making them more "kids books" than adult ones. There are some modern translations that might be better on this front. Edit: Mentioned elsewhere in this thread: <https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translations-that-dont-stink.html> https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translati..., which I have now bookmarked!
  - lordfrikk 7y ago
    Your link has a ">" at the end which makes it not work.
    - bzbarsky 7y ago
      Ugh, I keep forgetting that HN's URL delimiter handling is completely broken.... Unfortunately I can't edit my comment at this point, but the link should have been https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translations-that-dont-stink.html https://19thlevel.blogspot.com/2012/08/jules-verne-translati...

microtherion 7y ago

I enjoyed many of Verne's books as a child, so last year I tried reading some to my children. I thought the writing held up quite well (compared to e.g. Karl May, another author I loved reading when I was young): In particular, Verne is able to deploy ethnic caricatures without coming across as bigoted: > What can be added to these figures, so eloquent in themselves? Nothing. So the following calculation obtained by the statistician Pitcairn will be admitted without contestation: by dividing the number of victims fallen under the projectiles by that of the members of the Gun Club, he found that each one of them had killed, on his own account, an average of two thousand three hundred and seventy-five men and a fraction. > By considering such a result it will be seen that the single preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity philanthropically, and the perfecting of firearms considered as instruments of civilisation. It was a company of Exterminating Angels, at bottom the best fellows in the world.

bouvin 7y ago
I agree in general (adored Verne as child, and has enjoyed many of his books as an adult), but I would caution against reading Off on a Comet, as that contains pure, unadulterated, mean-spirited anti-semitism. At least that does not come to the fore in any other book of his that I have read.

f4stjack 7y ago

Oh man, I recently finished some of his novels and it is astounding to see the optimism he had for us, considering he was writing in a world before any world wars happened. I really would like to live in a Vernian world where people are mostly good and rationalism wins the day. But I also would like to live in Discworld (maybe except Fourecks) so caveat emptor! :'D

erk__ 7y ago
You should try and read the dystopian novel he wrote, it was first published in 1994. It paints a very bleak dystopian picture of Paris, it is an interesting contrast to his other works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century

acabal 7y ago

Shameless plug, we have a few Verne books downloadable for free as high-quality ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne/ https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne/ If you'd like to produce some new ones for everyone to read, get in touch at our mailing list!

nathell 7y ago

Ah, Verne. Brings back childhood memories. I consumed the entire Verne that was in my primary school library, maybe 15 novels in total. "The Mysterious Island" and "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" were one of the first books I read in English translations (my mother tongue is Polish), around the age of 13. Good times.

8bitsrule 7y ago

This story of the (usually serialized first) books' publishing history is interesting. (Many also had special 'Christmas editions'.) "... if variations in binding color are considered, more than 4000 different combinations of text and binding were published between 1866 and 1919." http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_1/harpold/ http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_1/harpold/

ZguideZ 7y ago

I love this. I ate these up as a kid and looked for the connections.

mirimir 7y ago

All here for free: https://www.epubbooks.com/series/1-voyages-extraordinaires https://www.epubbooks.com/series/1-voyages-extraordinaires Registration required, though.

misterprime 7y ago
And here without registration requirements: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/60 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/60
- mirimir 7y ago
  Gutenberg blocks German IPs.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Here's why: https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html PGLAF has taken an extreme position. In order to comply with a German court ruling about copyright infringement, it's made the entire site unavailable to German IP addresses. That would be like Google entirely cutting off the EU over "Right to be Forgotten" stuff. Google would never do that, because money. But PGLAF isn't about money. So anyway, I'm on PGLAF's side here, if anyone cares.
    - kwhitefoot 7y ago
      > But PGLAF isn't about money. But the decision to block German IP addresses /is/ about money. They made the point that it would be more expensive for PG to arrange to block specific works and that they simply don't have a budget for it. See https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html Edit: formatting.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
User: bugmenot@mailinator.com Password: bugmenot I downloaded Five Weeks in a Balloon and noticed that it does not credit a translator but does claim copyright. Seems a bit odd.

shakna 7y ago

Well, there's a number of people plugging their ebook sites of some of them easier to get books. As a slightly different plug, "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" from 1916 [0] is worth a glance. It's a silent film, so some people might not be able to watch it today, but is has some curiosities to it. It was the first feature filmed underwater, using a simple tube and mirror arrangement that most people here could come up with. It also had tons of extravagant sets, and so on, making it incredibly expensive for the era. Literature wise, it combines "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" and "The Mysterious Island", in a fairly faithful way. [0] https://sixteenmm.org/s/leaguesunderthesea_1916 https://sixteenmm.org/s/leaguesunderthesea_1916 Note: If it wasn't obvious from above, that's a link to something I run.

JoeDaDude 7y ago

In Prophets of Science Fiction [1], the TV Series about SF authors, they portrayed Jules Verne as disillusioned and depressed in his later years. They said he burned all his correspondence and in despair wrote his last work, Paris in the Twentieth Century [2], a somewhat dystopian novel in which art is no longer valued. It is such a contrast to his other novels I have to wonder how accurate this portrayal is, whether it was greatly exaggerated in some way. Can anyone comment on Verne's latter days? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_of_Science_Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_of_Science_Fiction [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century

quotemstr 7y ago

It's amazingly difficult to predict which of one's efforts is going to "stick". I've put years of work into things that ended up being total duds. I've also spent a few evenings here and there writing things off-the-cuff that ended up becoming famous. Just as we're lucky if we think one truly novel thought in all our lives, we're amazingly lucky if one part of our effort out of 54 becomes part of humanity's collective inheritance. Jules Verne was lucky several times over.

giorgioz 7y ago

>Human knowledge of the universe has widened and deepened since Verne's day, but for sheer intellectual and adventurous wonder about what that universe might contain, has any writer, from any era or land, outdone him since? Yes, we can safely say science fiction writers after Jules Verne has outdone him. Safely. I believe Jules Verne himself reading science fiction that came after himself would say so himself. Believing that one moment in the past was better than all the future moments is a classic form of romantic nostalgia in the style of Midnight in Paris of Woody Allen. I believe Jules Verne books were incredibile for the time and inspired millions of readers. Believing that Jules Verne was the apex though is very sad. It's absolutely the opposite of what Jules Verne was. Jules Verne was a dreamer believing in progress. When you believe that the Jules Verne was the apex of science fiction progress you are spitting in the face of his optimism.

nicodds 7y ago

Almost like Donald Knuth's TAOCP!