[HN Gopher] Jules Verne's Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vo...
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Jules Verne's Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume
Masterpiece
Author : vo2maxer
Score : 209 points
Date : 2020-02-10 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| ElFitz wrote:
| 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 etre
| et sera accompli". Which I would roughly translate as "All that
| is within the limits of the possible must and will be
| accomplished".
| thrower123 wrote:
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| "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"
| crmrc114 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sound like a niche business opportunity?
| alex_c wrote:
| _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.
| ZguideZ wrote:
| I love this. I ate these up as a kid and looked for the
| connections.
| abecedarius wrote:
| 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.
| James_Henry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Guess I'll have to learn French!
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| codeulike wrote:
| _Banks deals with cosmic horror, AI, and a touch of
| multiverse._
|
| Come on now, there's a lot more to Iain M Banks than that.
| Anarchist post-scarcity utopias, dirigible behemothaurs, The
| Shellworld Sursamen, and the mind-boggling purpose it was put
| to, the immenseness of Syang-un Nestworld, the idea that whole
| civilizations can sublime, Minds, pure energy creatures, The
| Girdlecity of Xown, in which a huge airship hosts a five year
| long two thousand person party to mark the end of a
| civilization. The Excession. The Affront! The subtle
| exploration of what people born into a galaxy spanning utopia
| might want to do with their time. And the fantastic and slighly
| disturbing idea that super intelligent Minds might give
| themselves silly names.
|
| And his non-Culture novel Feersum Endjinn, although its quite
| old now, had some startling ideas about cyberspace - that it
| might move thousands of times faster than base reality, and
| (major spoilers - ROT13) rfpncrq znyjner zvtug ribyir va uvtu-
| fcrrq plorefcnpr vagb n pvivyvmngvba infgyl byqre naq zber
| pbzcyvpngrq guna bhe bja, naq pbzcyrgryl vapbzcerurafvoyr gb hf
| ZguideZ wrote:
| Also Heinlein explored some pretty far out things.
| nsajko wrote:
| With names aready being dropped, here are some oldies: Clarke,
| Asimov, Stanislav Lem.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| Asimov's breadth tops NS's by far. He is famously the only
| author who has published works in every single category of
| the Dewey Decimal System, fiction and non-fiction. And his
| books feature another theme that NS never explored:
| coherent endings.
| klodolph wrote:
| Asimov never published a book categorized in the 100s.
| All nine other categories, yes.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Why not Crichton? Too much techno-thriller horror, despite his
| fantastical imaginings and settings?
| webmaven wrote:
| Ever notice that most Crichton plots end with things going
| back to the status quo?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| They're a little like Indiana Jones adventures except with
| technological terrors instead of ancient artifacts.
| hatenberg wrote:
| Philip K Dick had a pretty broad spectrum
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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!
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _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.
| nathell wrote:
| 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.
| mynegation wrote:
| 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.
| pi-rat wrote:
| Probably my favorite book as a child, I probably read that
| thing 100 times.
| mindcrime wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Don't forget an introduction to Chemistry in Mysterious Island
| as well. Fun fact, The Mysterious Island was the basis of the
| series LOST.
| tigershark wrote:
| 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.
| nsajko wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=tom+swift
| jvanvleet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unrelated fact: Tom Swift is why tasers are called tasers.
| Their inventor, Jack Cover
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cover), named them by
| acronymizing "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" (TASER).
| T-hawk wrote:
| 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.
| mynegation wrote:
| EDIT2: Basically any government that wants to improve
| investment into STEM should start by including those and
| similar books into the school reading program.
| bradyd wrote:
| I believe you actually mean "The Mysterious Island". I read
| this book last year and was amazed by the level of technical
| detail.
| nabla9 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I did the same. I got sidetracked with Tolkien and the Jim
| Kjelgaard Big Red books as well.
| ZguideZ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Depends on the parents. My kids biggest complaint about the
| library is that they are only allowed to checkout 100 books
| at a time.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| 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/
| acabal wrote:
| Shameless plug, we have a few Verne books downloadable for free
| as high-quality ebooks: 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!
| esch89 wrote:
| That's amazing!
| microtherion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| amerine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You're in luck! This week, via kottke.org:
| https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/
| kazinator wrote:
| A movie called _Vynalez zkazy_ ( "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_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...
| f4stjack wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| 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
| julienchastang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
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