Jules Verne (1828–1905), the French writer best known for his Voyages extraordinaires series, has had a wide influence in both scientific and literary fields.
The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont named Verne as his favorite author and the inspiration for his own elaborate flying machines.[4]Igor Sikorsky often quoted Verne and cited his Robur the Conqueror as the inspiration for his invention of the first successful helicopter.[5]
When cosmonaut Georgi Grechko was orbiting Earth with Yuri Romanenko on the Salyut 6 in 1978, he broadcast back a message to celebrate Verne's 150th birthday, saying: "There's hardly a person who hasn't read his books, at any rate not among the cosmonauts, because Jules Verne was a dreamer, a visionary who saw flights in space. I'd say this flight too was predicted by Jules Verne."[8]
Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer, was in his youth fascinated by Verne's novels, especially From the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.[9] Their influence was so strong that, like Verne, Hubble gave up the career path in law that his father intended for him, setting off instead to pursue his passion for science.[10]
The preeminent speleologistÉdouard-Alfred Martel noted in several of his scientific reports that his interest in caves was sparked by Verne's Mathias Sandorf.[11] Another influential speleologist, Norbert Casteret, traced his love of "caverns, abysses and underground rivers" to his avid youthful reading of Journey to the Center of the Earth,[12] calling it "a marvelous book, which impressed and fascinated me more than any other", and adding "I sometimes re-read it still, each time finding anew the joys and enthusiasm of my childhood".[13]
The French general Hubert Lyautey took much inspiration from the explorations in Verne's novels. When one of his more ambitious foreign projects was met with the reply "All this, sir, it's like doing a Jules Verne", Lyautey famously responded: "Yes, sir, it's like doing a Jules Verne, because for twenty years, the people who move forward have been doing a Jules Verne."[14]
David Hanson named the artificial intelligence conversational character robot designed and built by him Jules in memory of Jules Verne.[15] It is able to speak and respond in a human like manner, based on what it hears and has facial muscles that react to speech.[16]
Cover of L'Algerie magazine, June 15, 1884. The text reads "M. Jules Verne: going to the best sources for authentic information on the underwater world."
In the 1920s, many members of the Surrealist movement named Verne as one of their greatest and most imaginative precursors.[21]Eugène Ionesco said that all of his works, whether directly or indirectly, were written in celebration of Captain Hatteras's conquest of the North Pole.[22] Another surrealist, the Greek poet Andreas Embirikos, paid tribute to Verne in his nine-volume magnum opusThe Great Eastern (Megas Anatolikos, 1990), which borrows from Verne's A Floating City and includes Verne himself among its characters.[23]
Raymond Roussel was profoundly influenced both thematically and stylistically by Verne,[24][25] whom he called a "man of incommensurate genius" and an "incomparable master", adding that in many passages Verne "raised himself to the highest peaks that can be attained by human language."[25]
Jean Cocteau cited both Around the World in Eighty Days and Verne's own 1874 dramatization of it as major childhood influences, calling the novel a "masterpiece" and adding "Play and book alike not only thrilled our young imagination but, better than atlases and maps, whetted our appetite for adventure in far lands. … Never for me will any real ocean have the glamour of that sheet of green canvas, heaved on the backs of the Châtelet stage-hands crawling like caterpillars beneath it, while Phileas and Passepartout from the dismantled hull watch the lights of Liverpool twinkling in the distance."[26]
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who discovered the Voyages extraordinaires as a child and became one of Verne's enthusiastic adult proponents in the first half of the 20th century,[27] used Verne's The Black Indies as inspiration for his own novel Night Flight.[28]
The Swiss traveler and writer Nicolas Bouvier cited Verne as his initiation into geography, and named Mathias Sandorf and Phileas Fogg among his childhood heroes.[19] The British traveler and filmmaker Graham Hughes has similarly identified Fogg as one of his inspirations.[30]
In an introduction to a biography of Verne, Arthur C. Clarke wrote: "Jules Verne had already been dead for a dozen years when I was born. Yet I feel strongly connected to him, and his works of science fiction had a major influence on my own career. He is among the top five people I wish I could have met in person."[34]
The English novelist Margaret Drabble was deeply influenced by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas as a child and remains a fervent admirer of Verne. She comments: "I used to be somewhat ashamed of my love of Verne, but have recently discovered that he is the darling of the French avant-garde, who take him far more seriously than we Anglo-Saxons do. So I'm in good company."[35]
Ray Bradbury counted Verne as a main influence on his own fiction as well as on literature and science the world over, saying "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."[36]
Monument to Verne at the Jardin des Plantes in Nantes
Because Verne was a longtime resident of Amiens, many places there are named after him, such as the Cirque Jules Verne. Amiens is the place where Verne is buried, and the house where he lived is now a museum. There is also the Jules Verne MuseuminNantes.
In 1999, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Verne in its fourth annual class of two deceased and two living persons, citing him for having "helped shape and found modern science fiction." Verne is one of three inductees who contributed prior to 1900 (Wells, Verne and Mary Shelley preceded all other inductees by about one, two, and three generations) and one of two from outside the Anglophone world (the French artist Jean Giraud was inducted in 2011).[42][a]
Jules Verne appeared in the Transformers: Rescue Bots series episode "Last of Morocco", where he is revealed to be the estranged friend of recurring series antagonist Thaddeus Morocco. He is also a time traveler, having discovered a means of moving through the ages using a device of his own invention and Energon, the power source of all Transformers. After being contacted by his old friend, Verne travels to the present day, meets the Rescue Bots, and reveals that he has encountered other Transformers during his travels through time. At the time that he meets the series' heroes, he has not yet written Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, but later becomes determined to do so after taking a trip in a submarine. In a paradox, Morocco has a submarine called the Nemo that he presumably named for Jules Verne's character, whom Verne presumably named after the adventure involving the submarine. As a result of the episode's events, Verne takes Morocco - whose memories have been erased so that he no longer remembers his villainous career - to the future to live.
JV- The Extraordinary Adventures of Jules Verne is an Italian animated television series that recounts the fictionalized adventures of Jules Verne at age 16.
^Walter, Frederick Paul (2001), Introduction, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, by Verne, Jules, translated by Walter, retrieved 2 March 2013 – via Zvi Har’El
^Butcher, William (2005), "Preface", in Verne, Jules (ed.), The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Oxford: Oxford University Press, retrieved 30 March 2013
^Butcher, William (2005), "Notes", in Verne, Jules (ed.), The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 402, ISBN9780192804655, retrieved 11 May 2014
^International Astronomical Union (2010), "Jules Verne", Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, USGS, retrieved 22 April 2013
^ abScience Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, Mid American Science Fiction and Fantasy Conventions, Inc. (official website of the Hall of Fame to 2004), 22 February 2008, archived from the original on 21 May 2013, retrieved 15 May 2013
Butcher, William (2006), Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press
Evans, Arthur B. (2000), "Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon", in Smyth, Edmund J. (ed.), Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 11–39, retrieved 25 March 2013
Hale, Terry; Hugill, Andrew (2000), "The Science is Fiction: Jules Verne, Raymond Roussel, and Surrealism", in Smyth, Edmund J. (ed.), Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press
