Jules Verne – Part II
By Michael Raff, High Desert Branch
Looking ahead to this month’s Dickens Festival in Riverside, we present part two of this two-parter about one of the Victorian era’s most influential authors. See part one in January’s showcase.
Other influences were Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, and Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss.
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Verne died in 1905 while suffering from diabetes.
Verne’s books have been vastly successful with readers. He has been cited as one of the founding fathers of science fiction, along with H. G. Wells. He has also been referred to as a “prophet of scientific progress,” which Verne denied. He is the second most translated author, between Agatha Christie and Shakespeare. His works have been adapted for film, TV, comics, theater, opera, and video games. Critics haven’t always been kind. Some have labeled him a mere genre-based storyteller, not a serious author. Yet they have also said he had an impact on avant-garde and surrealism. I read The Mysterious Island while in grammar school and deemed it an adventure story.
Fun Facts about Jules Verne:
Author Ray Bradbury said of Verne, “We are all in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.”
His nephew Gaston shot him in the leg. Gaston spent his remaining days in a mental asylum. Verne ended up walking with a limp.
Some of Verne’s works were never published during his lifetime. His son, Michel, helped publish Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World.
After Hetzel rejected Paris in the Twentieth Century, it was believed lost but was recovered and published in 1994.
At Tokyo DisneySea, a theme park, is named after The Mysterious Island.
This piece originally appeared in The Inkslinger,
newsletter of the High Desert Branch, in September 2021.