The Man Who Saw the Future
Jules Verne wrote about submarines, space travel, and undersea exploration decades before any of it existed. He didn’t predict the future. He imagined it so clearly that engineers went and built it.Share on X
On February 8, 1828, Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France, and he’s generally credited as the father of science fiction, a title he shares with H.G. Wells. His father wanted him to be a lawyer. Verne fell in love with literature instead, and the world is better for the disappointment that caused in the Verne household.
I love Verne more than almost any other nineteenth-century writer. He wrote like a man who couldn’t wait to show you the machine, and that eagerness still jumps off the page a century and a half later.
Starting in the 1860s, Verne produced a run of novels that became the foundation of an entire genre.
Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, in 1869. Around the World in Eighty Days in 1873. The Mysterious Island in 1875. He grouped most of his work under the heading Voyages Extraordinaires, extraordinary voyages, and the name fit.
What makes Verne unusual is that he was right.
He wrote about submarines before practical submarines existed, about space travel a century before the moon landing, about undersea exploration before anyone could do it. His Nautilus inspired real inventors. His moon novel inspired real rocket scientists, including the Russian pioneer who helped found astronautics. Verne didn’t write fantasy. He extrapolated from the science of his day and imagined where it would go, so accurately that reality kept catching up to him.
Engineers building what a novelist dreamed up is the sort of thing that makes me proud to write fiction at all. Critics like to dismiss science fiction as escapism. Verne handed real inventors something to aim at.
That precision is what splits the two fathers of science fiction.
Verne and H.G. Wells both get the title, but they founded different halves of the genre. Verne was the engineer, obsessed with how the machine works, grounding every marvel in real mechanics and geography. Wells was more interested in the social and the strange, the time machine and the Martian invasion as ways to ask what humanity is.
Almost every science fiction writer since descends from one of those two instincts, the careful how of Verne or the unsettling what if of Wells. Knowing which one you lean toward tells you a lot about the kind of writer you are.
I lean Verne, if you’re asking. I want to know how the thing works before I care what it means, and I lose interest fast in a story that waves its hands over the machinery.
Second Only to Agatha Christie
Verne is the second most translated author in the history of the world. The only person ahead of him is Agatha Christie. Two genre writers sit at the very top of all of literature.Share on X
Here’s a fact that should make every genre writer sit up. Jules Verne is the second most translated author in the entire history of the world. The only author ahead of him is Agatha Christie.
The literary giants the academy worships lose this one. The two most translated authors who have ever lived are a science fiction writer and a mystery writer, the two of them, at the very top of all of literature, read in more languages than anyone else on Earth. The so-called genre writers, the ones critics spent a century dismissing as popular entertainment, turned out to be the ones the whole world wanted to read.
I find that satisfying, and it matters the next time someone sneers at science fiction or mysteries as lesser forms. The readers voted, across every language on the planet, and they voted for Verne and Christie.
There’s a lesson buried in that for any working writer.
Write the thing people want to read, the adventure, the puzzle, the voyage, and do it well, and you can reach further than any prize will ever carry you. Verne was never trying to impress critics. He was trying to thrill readers, and he thrilled them so thoroughly that a century after his death they’re still translating him into new languages.
Why I Reimagined Two of His Books
I loved Verne enough to go inside his work and retell it. Not because the originals were broken, but because every great story has rooms the original author never entered.Share on X
My own relationship with Verne goes past reading him. I loved his work enough to reimagine two of his classics, and you can read both on my fiction site.
The first is my version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, told from the inside. The Nautilus has taken three prisoners. Ned Land counts the days. Aronnax has quietly stopped planning to escape. And there’s a character who’s not a prisoner at all.
Verne told this story largely from the outside, as observed adventure. I wanted to get inside the submarine and inside the people trapped in it, to feel what that captivity does to a person.
The second is my reimagining of The Mysterious Island, and this one had a clear purpose.
Verne’s original gave the world Neb, a Black man from Cameroon who’s present on nearly every page of the book and absent from every sentence that mattered. He’s there the whole time and never allowed to be a real person. My version corrects that absence and gives Neb the interior life the original denied him.
Neb’s treatment is the flaw in Verne I couldn’t leave alone. A man present on nearly every page deserved a mind of his own, and giving him one felt like finishing a job the original walked away from.
That’s the thing about loving a classic. You don’t reimagine a book because it’s bad. You reimagine it because it’s great enough to be worth living inside, and because every great story has rooms the original author walked past without opening. Verne built worlds vast enough that there’s still room to explore in them a century and a half later.
What does Jules Verne teach writers?
Verne is a lesson in a few specific things, even now.
The first is grounding the fantastic in real detail. Verne’s wild inventions feel believable because he surrounded them with careful, accurate science and geography. The Nautilus works because everything around it’s so carefully observed that the one impossible thing slips right past your disbelief.
That’s the core trick of all good science fiction and fantasy. Ground the impossible in enough real, specific detail and the reader will follow you anywhere.
The second is that ideas have a longer shelf life than prose. Verne’s sentences, especially in the old translations, can be clunky, and his books are full of long catalogs and lectures. Yet the books survive, because the ideas underneath, the submarine, the moon shot, the journey downward, are so powerful that they carry everything else. A strong enough concept forgives a lot. It’s worth chasing the idea that big.
I find some of those catalogs tedious, and I’d skim them without a shred of guilt. The ideas carry the books anyway, and that tells you how big the ideas are.
The third is the one my own reimaginings are built on. The stories we inherit aren’t finished. Each generation gets to enter the great old books and find what the original missed, the silenced character, the unexplored interior, the question the author never thought to ask. It’s the highest compliment you can pay a writer, to keep living in the world he built.
So on February 8, read some Verne, or watch one of the many films made from him. Then ask yourself what rooms in your favorite old books nobody has ever opened. I’d much sooner see writers walk through Verne’s unlocked doors than churn out another timid copy of whatever sold last year, and he left plenty of doors to choose from.