Liverpool University Press, 160pp, np ISBN 0-85323-704-2
On the other hand, as several of the essays in this new collection make clear, French literature (at least in the Academie Francais) had little time for Verne - despite his labours. Yet it is interesting to realise, as Verne's answers to his interviewers pop up in essay after essay, that these are from different interviews at different times, conducted in French and English (though Verne admitted he could not read English well enough to follow our literature in the original), showing the early and continuing influence Verne achieved across the English speaking globe.
The authors of these ten essays (including Edmund Smyth's introduction) are principally concerned with tying Verne into the French literary canon. Which means, also, pointing out how far the establishment tended to exclude him. Nevertheless Verne went on writing undaunted. He was a man who could turn the legendary laundry list into art - at least it is claimed that AROUND THE WORLD is little more than an expansion of Thomas Cook's catalogue, and Timothy Unwin has other examples of what he calls Verne's "near-plagiarism" of technical works.
Despite his addiction to the real, Verne managed to take the wonders of the natural world, and take technology, too, and merge them into something that his readers perceived as much greater. In rather too little detail Daniel Compere points out Verne can use these features in his fantasies - his example comes from THE FLOATING TOWN (UNE VILLE FLOTTANTE) where the traitor is killed during a duel because his sword acts as a lightning conductor. And amazingly for a man known for popularizing "science" Verne's tendency to use natural phenomena as the device by which his story is brought to an end - literally the catastrophe - (the flushing out by lava of Professor Lidenbrook's party and the destruction by maelstrom of Captain Nemo being the best-known examples, though no more than typical) suggest a man who never envisaged the world becoming subject by the technological advances he described.
For an author who could include such contradictions it is no wonder to find his appeal to the surrealists and the other alternative schools of French literature in the twentieth century.
Students will need a better reading knowledge of French than me (ie to follow complete books) because the authors of these essays tend to make their associations only with French literature and its criticism. For instance, in Sarah Capitanio's interesting essay on Verne and utopianism her references are restricted to criticism of - and utopiae written in - French, which will restrict this for students who might like to include references to the much bigger world of Utopian fiction. But that is a small point out to make.
Look out, this is going to end as a comet strikes. If I were Verne I would include some lines of differential calculus on its speed and acceleration.