Jules Verne
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Jules Verne pioneered the science fiction genre. He developed a vocabulary that would
enhance his “novel of science” in 65 volumes, of which the most famous are Five Weeks in a
Balloon (1862) Voyage to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Mysterious Island. These novels also provided Verne with the opportunity to engage in social criticism concerning, for example, the abuses of European colonization, whales as an endangered species, fossil fuel pollution, and slaughtering elephants for ivory. Most people called Verne a prophet for his time. Verne was also a visionary with a sense of poetry evident in his descriptions of the landscapes and animals that fill his fantasic journeys.
Some of Vernes Novel’s had objects or ideas that coincide with the future of his time period or ours. Such as in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Captain Nemo’s name is a subtle allusion to Homers Odyssey a Greek epic poem. In the odyssey, Odysseus meets the monstrous Cyclops polyphemous during the course of his wonderings. Odysseus translates to (“No Man” or “ No-body). In Latin Nemo translates to the same exact thing. Similar to Nemo Odysseus is forced to wonder the seas in exile ( though only for ten years ) and is tormented by the deaths of his ships crew. “Captain Maury” in Verne’s book, is a real life oceanographer who explored the winds, seas, currents, and collected samples of the bottom of the seas and charted all of these things. References are made to three other French men. Those are Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de la PД©rouse, a famous explorer who was lost while circumnavigating the globe; Dumont D’ Urville, the explorer who found remains of the ill fated
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ship of the count; and Ferdinand Lesseps builder of the Suez channel and the nephew of the
man who was the soul survivor of De Galaups expedition.
The Nautilus seems to follow the footsteps of these men: she visits the waters were De
Galaup was lost; she sails to Antarctica waters and becomes stranded there, just like D’ Urvilles
ship the Astrolab; and she passes through an underwater tunnel from the red see into the
Mediterranean. The most famous part of the novel, the battle against the school of giant squid,
begins when a crewman opens the hatch of the boat and gets caught by one of the monsters. As
he is being pulled away by the tentacle that has grabbed him, he yells “Help!” in French. At the
beginning of the next chapter, concerning the battle, Arronax states that: “To convey such sights,
it would take the pen of our most famous poet, Victor Hugo, author of The Toilers of the Sea.”
The Toilers of the Sea also contains an episode where a worker fights a giant octopus; and
there, the octopus symbolizes the Industrial Revolution. Verne