Jules Verne - Floating Island

Edited by Kaori OConnor

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES

Louis Becke Pacific Tales

James S. de Benneville Tales of the Samurai

Isabella Bird Korea and her Neighbours

Isabella Bird Six Months in Hawaii

Katharine Augusta Carl With the Empress Dowager of China

Miguel Covarrubias Island of Bali

Miguel Covarrubias Mexico South

Paul Gauguin Intimate Journals

Jukichi Inouye Home Life in Tokyo

Washington Irving Astoria

John La Farge An American Artist in the South Seas

Jack London Cruise of the Snark

Pierre Loti Japan: Madame Chrysanthemum

Pierre Loti Tahiti: The Marriage of Loti

Herman Melville Omoo

Herman Melville Typee

Charles Nordhoff Nordhoffs West Coast

Robert Louis Stevenson In the South Seas

To know Jules Verne only through such of his books as Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) is to know but a small part of the work of this extraordinary man who left his stamp upon his century and our own.

The books for which Verne is best known today are early works imbued with the spirit of the first part of the nineteenth century an era of unparalleled excitement, expansion and experiment when the popular imagination could barely keep pace with the scientific developments that promised to change the human condition forever. The mood of the times was one of optimism and an unquestioning belief in science and progress, and no one captured this spirit more perfectly than Jules Verne. As soon as they were written, the books that comprise the first part of his series Extraordinary Voyages: Known and Unknown Worlds which aimed, in the words of his publisher, to summarize all geographical, geological, physical and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science were translated into every European language, and were read as avidly by adults as by the young. In them, Verne bridged the gap between science and romance, founded the genre of modern science fiction, and inspired generations of future scientists, explorers, inventors and adventurers. Radar, teleprinters, audiovisual telephones, lasers, synthetic diamonds and air conditioning were only a few of the inventions that first appeared in the pages of a Verne book; polar exploration, long-range submarine navigation and space travel were exploits of Verne heroes long before they were enacted in real life. He envisaged the modern world with a remarkable clarity that was far from accidental, for all his literary inventions were based solidly on established scientific principles, and he prided himself on being a realist rather than a fantasist. As he put it in his book The Carpathian Castle;

This story is not fantastic, it is only romantic. It would be a mistake to conclude from its improbability that it cannot be a true story. We are living in days when anything can happen one may say that everything has happened. If our tale seems improbable today, it need not do so tomorrow, thanks to the resources science will make available in the future, and nobody will then think of calling it fanciful.

Yet as the nineteenth century drew to a close, Verne had grave doubts about the course the new world he had envisaged was taking, and he began to reflect on what the social and political consequences of technological progress would be. What he foresaw overshadowed the later years of his life and changed the course of his writing. He had begun as an innovative writer who invested scientific fact with romance, adventure, melodrama and idealism he developed into a savage social satirist who has been compared to Montesquieu, Swift and Voltaire. In recent years, the works of Jules Verne have been subject to a critical re-evaluation in France and elsewhere, and it is largely on the basis of his satirical novels that Verne is now seen as one of the most significant writers and social commentators of modern times. The Floating Island (1895) an account of a sea-going city of American millionaires cruising about the Pacific is the finest of Vernes satirical novels, a masterpiece whose theme is as timely now as when it was written.

Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France on February 8, 1828, the first of four children of Sophie Allotte de la Fuye, who came from a family long established in the West Indies mercantile trade and Pierre Verne, a solicitor whose father and grandfather had been judges. Pierre Verne, who exerted a considerable influence over his sons life and work, was remembered by a member of his family as highly intelligent a passionate music lover a very erudite scholar, a gifted and witty poet, but also very interested in science and the latest discoveries1 a description that would in many respects serve for Jules in later years. Extremely pious, he was an ardent Jansenistic Christian who ensured that his children acquired a clear moral sense. Although the law was not his consuming interest in life, Pierre Verne had a deep respect for his profession and a prudent appreciation of the fact that it provided the means for him to keep his family in moderate comfort and the time to engage in scholarly studies. Although his eldest son displayed a taste for literature and the arts from childhood, Pierre Verne expected Jules to follow him into his solicitors practice, and to pursue his other interests privately, as he himself had done.

The young Jules was a dilatory student during his schooldays, filling his notebooks with drawings of ships and strange machines, and spending as much time as he could at the Nantes docks. At eleven he made an unsuccessful attempt to run away as a cabin boy on a ship bound for the West Indies; thereafter he was obliged to restrict himself to sailing a small skiff on the Nantes estuary, and to voyages of the imagination in which he fantasised that the island suburb where his family lived would float out to sea, and on to faraway lands. The effort he might have expended on school compositions was lavished instead on poetry and dramatic sketches, and he was bitterly disappointed when his works received little encouragement from his family or his cousin Caroline, whom he hoped to marry. After passing his baccalaureate, Jules entered his fathers practice and began to prepare for his law examinations, becoming increasingly restive after his cousin announced her engagement to a rival. Jules passed his preliminary law examinations with little difficulty, but was plunged into depression by his cousins marriage. Aware that their son had little interest in the law at the best of times, Juless parents reluctantly agreed to allow him to complete his legal studies in Paris, and he arrived in the capital in November, 1848 on the day that the Premier, Lamartine, inaugurated the new regime that had deposed Louis Phillipe from the throne.