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Memory forgives a multitude of literary sins. Middling prose, wooden characterization, boilerplate dialogue—all of these will be overlooked, if a writer can only seize upon one great story and carry it off reasonably well. James Fenimore Cooper's novels are bathed in bathos and bad writing, but he has survived two centuries of critical disdain because of five thrilling words: The Last of the Mohicans. H. Rider Haggard churned out 69 books that are forgotten by everyone save scholars of Victorian arcane—but King Solomon's Mines ensured his immortality even so. Bram Stoker wrote 12 terrible novels, but nobody cares, because the thirteenth was Dracula.
by Jules Verne Translated by Stanford L. Luce, Edited by Arthur B. Evans |
Then there is Jules Verne. He is remembered by the critics as "the father of science fiction" and hailed for his uncanny technological forecasts: submarines and skyscrapers, rocket ships and long-range missiles. But in the popular imagination, it doesn't matter much anymore that Verne wrote about space flight 90 years before it happened, or that his descriptions of a deep-diving submarine inspired inventors to improve upon the primitive designs of the 1860s. What endures are his stories, not his prophecies: Phileas Fogg racing around the world and against the clock; Captain Nemo, the deep-sea revolutionary, plotting his course through depths where even Ahab feared to tread.
Without a Fogg or a Nemo to carry the reader along, prescience turns quickly to pedantry, and the thrill of science fiction gives way to the tedium of the lecture hall. Nothing proves this point so well as The Begum's Millions, one of four Verne novels recently translated for Wesleyan's Early Classics of Science Fiction series. Penned in 1879, after the success of his "voyages extraordinaires"—Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and From the Earth to the Moon—had made his reputation and his fortune, The Begum's Millions belongs on the kind of college syllabus that privileges "historically interesting" books over good ones. It's as prescient, in its way, as anything else Verne wrote, but its predictive power doesn't make it any easier to slog through.
The idea is promising enough: a fabulously wealthy Anglo-Indian grandee dies without an heir, and after various investigations and negotiations by a hard-nosed English solicitor named Sharp, the Begum's fortune is divided between two academics, one German and one French. But as soon as the two protagonists are introduced, it's clear that Verne is primarily interested in refighting the Franco-Prussian War, this time on grounds of his own creation. Dr. Sarassin, the Frenchman, is an absentminded idealist, "one of those individuals who, at first glance, prompts people to say: 'There's a fine fellow.'" The German, Dr. Schultze, is a toothy demon, a man "whose appearance was obviously disturbing and off-putting for others, a state of affairs which visibly satisfied the professor." (Just in case we've missed the point, Schultze is found at work on a paper entitled "Why are All Frenchmen Stricken in Different Degrees with Hereditary Degeneration?")
The high-minded Frenchman and the brutish German decide to use their fortunes to build model cities in the trackless wilderness of the American northwest. Sarassin's France-Ville is conceived as a "City of Well Being," a meticulously planned, hypersanitary prefiguration of the dreary socialist fantasia that Edward Bellamy would conjure up a decade later in Looking Backward (another book that languishes unread on countless college syllabi). Schultze's city, on the other hand, is closer to Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Christened Stahlstadt, the City of Steel, it's a grim and hierarchical factory town, with a central garden where the sinister German doctor relaxes and plans out his ever-more-elaborate war machines. These weapons are to be turned on France-Ville, which is to be annihilated as an object lesson in German superiority—and because Schultze, in fine Nietzschean style, considers himself "especially designated by the constantly creative and destructive force of Nature to wipe out the pygmies rebelling against it."
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