Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures: Return to the Center of the Earth and Other Extraordinary Voyages, New Tales by the Heirs of Jules Verne

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The Mammoth Book of

New Jules Verne

Adventures

Edited by Mike Ashley

and Eric Brown

CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS

New York

Carroll & Graf Publishers

An imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.

245 W. 17th Street

New York

NY 10011-5300

www.carrollandgraf.com

First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable& Robinson Ltd 2005

First Carroll & Graf edition 2005

Collection and editorial material copyright Mike Ashley and EricBrown

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproducedin any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN 0-7867-1495-6

Printed and bound in the EU

an ebookman scan

CONTENTS

All stories, exceptthose listed below, are original to this anthology and are copyright 2005 inthe name of the individual authors. They are used by permission of the authorsand their agents.

Columbiad is 1996 byStephen Baxter. First published in Science Fiction Age, May 1996.Reprinted by permission of the author.

The True Story ofBarbicanes Voyage 1999 by Laurent Genefort. Originally published as Le VeritableVoyage de Barbicane in Futurs anterieurs (Fleuve noir, 1999). It ispublished here in English for the first time. Printed by permission of theauthor.

Our thanks to Jean-MarcLofficier and Victor Berch for their advice and help.

Jules Verne was aphenomenon.

In a writing lifespanning over forty years, he produced more than sixty novels of adventure andexploration, creating a sub-genre of fiction that exploded on to the world at atime when both the advances of science and technology, and the physicalexploration of the world, were proceeding at an exponential rate.

Jules Verne was born inNantes in 1828, to a prosperous middle-class family. His father was asuccessful lawyer who hoped that his eldest son might follow him into theprofession. But Verne dreamed of adventure. As a boy, living in the port ofNantes, he day-dreamed of sailing around the world. Family legend has it thathe even stowed away aboard a ship, only to be dragged home by his irate fatherwhen the ship docked further down the French coast. In 1848 Verne did escape though only as far as Paris, where he combined working on the stock exchangewith penning much bad poetry and short comedy plays which were staged at the ThtreLyrique and the Thtre Historique, without success or critical acclaim.

He sold a few shortstories around this time, the first being Les Premiers Navires de la marinemexicaine (usually translated as The Mutineers or A Drama in Mexico) whichappeared in the monthly magazine Muse des families in July 1851.

It was not until 1863,with the publication of his first book, Five Weeks in a Balloon, thatsuccess and acclaim eventually came to Verne. This is the story of DrFergusson, his friend Dick Kennedy and loyal man-servantJoe Smith, and their intrepid balloon journey across the continent of Africafrom Zanzibar to Senegal. Headlong adventure alternates with much (often, itmust be said, too much) scientific detail but the story caught theimagination of readers in France, Britain and America. The novel was abest-seller, its documentary narrative convincing some readers that it was atrue account.

Verne was fortunate thathis publisher, Jules Hetzel, was one of the most enterprising in France, and hesaw the potential in Vernes work. He gave Verne a contract for three books ayear and also used Verne as the final catalyst to launch his new magazine foryounger readers, the Magasin dEducation et de Rcration. The firstissue appeared on 20 March 1864 featuring the opening instalment of Vernes newnovel, Les Anglais au Pole Nord (The English at the North Pole).

With a publisher keen tobring out his books, many serialized during the year and published in volumeform in time for Christmas, Jules Vernes writing career was under way. Overthe course of the next ten years he wrote the novels for which he is famoustoday: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth tothe Moon (1865), Round the Moon (1870), Twenty Thousand Leagues Underthe Sea (1873), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), and TheMysterious Island (1874). These novels sold in their tens of thousands andVerne became a wealthy man, often turning out two novels a year in a non-stopwriting routine that was to last until his death in 1905.

His later booksabandoned much of the scientific detail of his early novels, and heconcentrated on portraying adventures set in the four corners of the globe.While these were not as popular as his scientific romances, and sales declinedtowards the end of his life, his work was still in sufficient demand after hisdeath for his publisher to bring out several volumes co-authored with (and somewholly written by) his son Michel.

Verne is often citedtoday as one of the founding fathers of science fiction,along with H.G. Wells. The fact is that Verne rarely extrapolated fromscientific advances to create visions of the future his novels were firmlygrounded in the here and now of the late Victorian period. The genre Vernecreated had no name though its as much the forerunner of the moderntechno-thriller as it was science fiction and there were precious few otherexponents: he was a craftsman who chiselled out his own niche to create storieswholly Vernian. In his better known and most highly regarded novels, he tappedinto the burgeoning scientific curiosity of the age and brought a clear-mindedtechnological understanding to stirring stories of derring-do and adventure invarious parts of the world as well as under the sea and in space.