Name: VERNE, Jules Gabriel Aged: 77
Born: Feb 8, 1828 Where: Nantes, FRANCE
Died: March 24, 1905 Where: Amiens, FRANCE
Interred: La Madeleine Cemetery, Amiens
Married: Honorine de Viane (Mrs.) When: January 10, 1857
Awarded: 1999 inductee into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame

France has given the world two of its greatest prophets, Nostradamus and Jules Verne. One might conclude that either there is something in the water or a genetic enhancement is operating. Probably both, plus factors unknown.

Jules Verne, one of Science Fiction's founding fathers, was born in the port city of Nantes, France, the son of a successful lawyer. Jules followed that profession, relocating to Paris, where he studied law and practiced a play-writing hobby. History says Verne was influenced by reading some works of Edgar Allen Poe before writing his first fantasy story, "A Voyage in a Balloon," in 1851 (a subject he would return to). But a decade of life, law, stockbrokering, and literary searching would pass before events aligned that would direct Verne's writing career.

In 1862, Verne offered to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, a writer and publisher of literature for children and young adults, a series of works to be called Voyages Extraordinaire. The first, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was published in 1863 and attained enough success to allow the Verne/Hetzel association to grow and endure thru Verne's entire career. Verne's stories were nearly always serialized in Jules Hetzel's periodical, Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation, after which Hetzel published them in book form. Four of Verne's resulting novels have remained in almost continuous print for over a century, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Mysterious Island and Around the World in Eighty Days, based on the exploits of real-life traveller, George Francis Train. And just recently, the first English version of the 1863 novel Paris in the Twentieth Century has been published, revealing a highly prophetic look at the future and requiring reassessment of Verne as a seer.

Visionaries like Verne are often poo-pooed or seemingly discredited as time and events unfold. Take for example Verne's 1865 From Earth to the Moon where the spaceship is shot to the Moon from a giant cannon. Small minds love to jump all over this and categorically state that humans inside the ship would have been crushed to death. Yeh...unless...you slow the muzzle velocity down by extending the powder burn time. Its called a rocket, and its still a gun, and it gets people to the Moon and back. Verne described what he saw. The real question is...how did he see it?

Verne's life in Europe was reasonably free of war and major social disturbances. He enjoyed financial success and remained comfortable thru-out his life. His marriage appears normal and uneventful; although in 1886, Verne was wounded by a nephew's pistol-shot in the left leg, which left Jules with a stiff leg and permanent limp. While he enjoyed yachting, it was the extent of his real life adventuring, leaving the rest for his novels. Advancing age and a regular writing schedule of at least two volumes a year, shows the normal decline of optimism and adventurism into pessimism and fatalism. Verne published 65 novels, thirty plays, librettos, geographies, and occasional short stories and essays. To that, add a high percentage of immortal works that would awe and inspire this world's youth for a century to come, at least. Not many accomplished that better.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

BIOGRAPHY: You might like The Jules Verne Encyclopedia from Scarecrow Press (Lanham, Md), 1996

OBITUARY: The New York Times, Saturday, March 25, 1905

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