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

life with great swirlings of scarlet and purple and
the scent of attar of roses. Nadar was involved in two
breaking high-tech developments of the period:
photography and ballooning. (Nadar is perhaps best
remembered today as the father of aerial photography.)
Nadar had Big Ideas. Jules' real forte was
geography--a date-line or a geodesic sent him into
raptures--but he liked Nadar's style and knew good
copy when he saw it. Jules helped out behind the
scenes when Nadar launched THE GIANT, the largest
balloon ever seen at the time, with a gondola the size
of a two-story house, lavishly supplied with
champagne. Jules never rode the thing--he had a wife
and kids now--but he retired into his study with the
plot-line of his first book, and drove his wife to
distraction. "There are manuscripts everywhere--
nothing but manuscripts," she said in a fine burst of
wifely confidence. "Let's hope they don't end up under
the cooking pot."
_Five Weeks In A Balloon_ was Jules' first hit.
The thing was a smash for his publisher, who

sold it
all over the world in lavish foreign editions for
which Jules received pittances. But Jules wasn't
complaining--probably because he wasn't paying
attention.
With a firm toehold in the public eye, Jules
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