"Bruce Sterling - Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

soon hit his stride as a popular author. He announced
to the startled stockbrokers: "Mes enfants, I am
leaving you. I have had an idea, the sort of idea that
should make a man's fortune. I have just written a
novel in a new form, one that's entirely my own. If it
succeeds, I shall have stumbled upon a gold mine. In
that case, I shall go on writing and writing without
pause, while you others go on buying shares the day
before they drop and selling them the day before they
rise. I am leaving the Bourse. Good evening, mes
enfants."
Jules Verne had invented hard science fiction.
He originated the hard SF metier of off-the-rack plots
and characters, combined with vast expository lumps of
pop science. His innovation came from literary
naivete; he never learned better or felt any reason
to. (This despite Apollinaire's sniping remark: "What
a style Jules Verne has, nothing but nouns.")
Verne's dialogue, considered quite snappy for
the period, was derived from the stage. His characters
constantly strike dramatic poses: Ned Land with
harpoon upraised, Phileas Fogg reappearing stage-right
in his London club at the last possible tick of the
clock. The minor characters--comic Scots, Russians,
Jews--are all stage dialect and glued-on beards,
instantly recognizable to period readers, yet fresh
because of cross-genre effects. They brought a proto-
cinematic flash to readers used to the gluey, soulful
character studies of, say, Stendhal.
The books we remember, the books determined
people still occasionally read, are products of Verne
in his thirties and forties. (His first novel was
written at thirty-five.) In these early books, flashes
of young Jules' student radicalism periodically
surface for air, much like the Nautilus. The character
of Captain Nemo, for instance, is often linked

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to
novelistic conventions of the Byronic hero. Nemo is,
in fact, a democratic terrorist of the period of '48,
the year when the working-class flung up Paris
barricades, and, during a few weeks of brief civil
war, managed to kill off more French army officers
than were lost in the entire Napoleonic campaigns. The
uprising was squelched, but Jules' generation of Paris