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

_First Men In The Moon_: "Where is this gravity-
repelling metal? Let him show it to me." If not the
earliest, it is certainly the most famous exemplar of
the hard-SF writer's eternal plaint against the
fantasist.
The last years were painful. A deranged nephew
shot Verne in the foot, crippling him; it was at this
time that he wrote one of his rare late poems, the
"Sonnet to Morphine." He was to have a more than
nodding acquaintance with this substance, though in
those days of children's teething-laudanum no one
thought much of it. He died at seventy-seven in the
bosom of his vigorously quarrelling family, shriven by
the Church. Everyone who had forgotten about him wrote
obits saying what a fine fellow he was. This is the
Verne everyone thinks that they remember: the
greybearded paterfamilias, the conservative Catholic
hardware-nut, the guy who made technical forecasts
that Really Came True if you squint real hard and
ignore most of his work.
Jules Verne never knew he was "inventing science
fiction," in the felicitous phrase of Peter Costello's
insightful 1978 biography. He knew he was on to
something hot, but he stepped onto a commercial
treadmill that he didn't understand, and the money and
the fame got to him. The early artistic failures, the
romantic rejections, had softened him up, and when the
public finally Recognized His Genius he was grateful,
and fell into line with their wishes.

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Jules had rejected respectability early on, when
it was offered to him on a plate. But when he had
earned it on his own, everyone around him swore that
respectability was dandy, and he didn't dare face them
down. Wanting the moon, he ended up with a hatch-
battened one-man submarine in an upstairs room.
Somewhere along the line his goals were lost, and he
fell into a role his father might almost have picked
for him: a well-to-do provincial city councilman. The
garlands disguised the reins, and the streetcorner
radical with a headful of visions became a dusty
pillar of society.
This is not what the world calls a tragedy; nor
is it any small thing to have books in print after 125