Susan Adams

Susan Adams, Forbes Staff

I cover careers, jobs and every aspect of leadership.

4/15/2002 @ 12:00AM

Eerily Prescient

New novels cinch Jules Verne’s reputation as the Nostradamus of technology.

Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, Faith Popcorn: all of them famous prognosticators. Yet each comes off a piker when compared to the true master of industrial clairvoyance, Jules Verne. As a bevy of new books (some never before available in English) makes plain, no modern seer is worthy to touch so much as the hem of his diving suit.

Before he died in 1905, Verne had depicted–in some 60 novels–a world eerily like ours: airplanes, movies, guided missiles, submarines, the electric chair, air conditioning and the fax machine. Even Islamic terrorists make their precocious debut in Invasion Of the Sea (1905), in which they face off against Western technocrats. The book, now translated into English for the first time (Wesleyan University Press, $25), is but one of five newly released Verne novels coming out over the next two years.

Even where Verne was wrong, he may eventually be right. Case in point: space travel. He nailed many details perfectly. In his version (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865, and its sequel, All Around the Moon, 1870), an aluminum craft launched from central Florida achieves a speed of 24,500 miles per hour, circles the moon and splashes down in the Pacific. A century later Apollo 8, made of aluminum and traveling at 24,500 miles an hour, took off from central Florida. It circled the moon and splashed down in the Pacific.

What’s wrong with this picture? Verne’s vehicle is not a rocket but a projectile launched into space by a gigantic cannon. As recently as 1990, though, British engineer Gerald Bull came close to building just such a gun for Saddam Hussein–so close that unknown agents snuffed him out before he could complete the job. We may yet live to see such space cannons.

Verne never studied science formally. Pushed to get a law degree by his lawyer father, he toiled as a stockbroker, not publishing his first novel until 1863, at the ripe old age of 35. He sucked in scientific knowledge from 15 newspapers a day, as well as a half-dozen magazines and the bulletins of various scientific and geographic societies. His genius lay in extrapolation. Everything he wrote had as its foundation the best engineering and best science of his day. His future was the present on steroids.

Verne insisted, for example, that the Nautilus, the submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), was “nothing wholly extraordinary, nor beyond the bounds of actual scientific knowledge.” He was right. By the 1860s submarines indeed existed–for military use. But they were cramped, two- or three-man vessels, nothing like Captain Nemo’s capacious craft, with its 20-foot ceilings, library, pipe organ and fountain bubbling with fresh water.

In Paris in the Twentieth Century, published for the first time in 1994, Verne described fax machines, gas-powered cars and an elevated mass transit system. None of these existed when he wrote the book in 1863. But there were precursors, such as the facsimile gizmo Scottish inventor Alexander Bain devised in 1842. It had two styli connected to pendulums joined to a wire and could reproduce writing on an electrically conductive surface. As for automobiles:Though cars were still 23 years off, the internal combustion engine had been invented.

While Verne and H.G. Wells are commonly regarded as twin pioneers of science fiction, Wells was by far the more “fantastic” of the two. Verne said of Wells in an interview: “Iconsider him a purely imaginative writer.” Again Verne was far more right than wrong. Wells, like Verne, tried to predict how man’s first lunar voyage might unfold (The First Men in the Moon, 1901). But in the Briton’s version, the vehicle is a sphere covered in venetian blinds. When opened and closed, these blinds–coated with a gravity-defying substance–initiate man’s voyage into space.

Nobody bats 1,000, of course–not even the master, and many of the things Verne predicted have failed to appear, such as the movable 10-square-mile island built by a group of millionaires in Propeller Island (1895): Home to a large city, it moved around the Pacific Ocean on electric power. Then there was the chameleonlike craft in Master of the World (1904)–a car/airplane/submarine/boat hybrid that transformed itself, as needed, to the demands of ground, air or sea travel.

Spurred on by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne often included in the texts didactic technical explanations of how his inventions worked. The Catholic church controlled France’s schools in the 19th century and frowned on the teaching of science. By weaving science lessons into roiling adventure tales, Verne and Hetzel strove to circumvent those strictures.

Verne’s English publishers, however, didn’t favor this same didacticism, and early translators chopped out whole chunks of Verne’s work. Worse, some early translations were atrociously sloppy. In the 1872 English version of 20,000 Leagues (regrettably still in print), Canadian harpooner Ned Land lights a fire with “a lentil.”Verne wrote lentille,meaning “lens.”

The good news for Verne readers:Steadily, the 40-odd badly translated works are being improved in new editions. One of his most wonderful adventure stories, The Mysterious Island, about five men stranded in the South Seas, has just been reworked into English by two different scholars (Modern Library, $24 and Wesleyan University Press, $40). Modern Library’s is the more elegant, inviting translation, but Wesleyan’s has the advantage of including all 150 of the gorgeous woodcuts created for the original French 1870 version.

Verne books are freebies for publishers, since European and U.S. law puts previously published work into the public domain 70 years after an author’s death. Movie and television producers are also cashing in. The Disney film Atlantis, partly inspired by 20,000 Leagues, is perhaps the most recent example.

Verne did well by authors’ standards of his day. He got a cut of theater adaptations–the 19th-century equivalent of optioning screenplays. According to Arthur B. Evans, the most prominent Verne scholar in the U.S. and professor of modern languages at DePauw University, Verne earned more than 50,000 francs–roughly $139,000 in today’s dollars–from his share of the box office take the first year Around the World in 80 Days was performed on stage.Verne’s deal with Hetzel, his shrewd publisher, was less lucrative. Until 1875, Verne earned a flat sum for each manuscript, with no royalties. For 20,000 Leagues, for instance, he got 3,000 francs, or the equivalent of roughly $8,300. After 1875 he made royalties, but they were not large–only 5% of first-edition sales.

Verne may not have been a great businessman, but he remained intrigued until the end of his life by matters financial. In his 70s, he told a journalist, “If I were young enough I would be tempted to take up the greatest set of subjects the novelist of the future will have–the fictions of business life, with the intricate intrigues  and gigantic deals.” Could he have had Ken Lay in mind?

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