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

banished onto a naval voyage. Michel ended up
producing silent films, not very successfully. Jules'
stepdaughters made middle-class marriages and vanished
into straitlaced Catholic domesticity, where they
cooked up family feuds against their scapegrace half-
brother.
Verne's work is marked by an obsession with
desert islands. Mysterious Isles, secret hollow
volcanoes in the mid-Atlantic, vast ice-floes that
crack off and head for the North Pole. Verne never
really made it into the bosom of society. He did his
best, and played the part whenever onstage, but one
senses that he knew somehow that he was Not Like The
Others and might be torn to pieces if his facade
cracked. One notes his longing for the freedom of
empty seas and skies, for a submarine full of books
that can sink below storm level into eternal calm, for
the hollow shell fired into the pristine unpeopled
emptiness of circumlunar space.
From within his index-card lighthouse, the
isolation began to tell on the aging Jules. He had now
streamlined the production of novels to industrial
assembly-work, so much so that lying gossip claimed he
used a troop of ghostwriters. He could field-strip a
Verne book blindfolded, with a greased slot for every
part--the daffy scientist, the comic muscleman or
acrobat, the ordinary Joe who asks all the wide-eyed
questions, the woman who scarcely exists and is
rescued from suttee or sharks or red Indians.
Sometimes the machine is the hero--the steam-driven
elephant, the flying war-machine, th

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e gigantic raft--
sometimes the geography: caverns, coal-mines, ice-
floes, darkest Africa.
Bored, Jules entered politics, and joined the
Amiens City Council, where he was quickly shuffled
onto the cultural committee. It was a natural sinecure
and he did a fair job, getting electric lights
installed, widening a few streets, building a
municipal theater that everyone admired and no one
attended. His book sales slumped steadily. The woods
were full of guys writing scientific romances by now--
people who actually knew how to write novels, like
Herbert Wells. The folk-myth quotes Verne on Wells'