Verne was translated into English in the age of cynical imperialism by men who did not think they had a duty to be loyal to the French original. But most of us, dependent on English translations, do not know — perhaps yet — all that he revealed of himself a day before his death. Captain Nemo with his submarine Nautilus, the most-loved of Verne''s heroes was an Indian — a projection of Nana Sahib after the Mutiny of 1857. Unlike the Americans who did not care to read the translations of Verne, which though not competently done had enough to attract their scientific attention, we were delibera-tely deprived of chunks of what Verne wrote about contemporary Indian events. The problem that Indians have with Jules Verne has so far been of a different kind. For Osama bin Laden, Verne''s Epouvante or Terror — an automobile, ship, submarine and aircraft all in one — is a dream weapon. But a super-gun is a possi-bility as was nearly proved by Gerald Bull, a Canadian expert who led Saddam Hussein''s Babylon Project until he was killed by Israel''s Mossad outside his apartment in Belgium. The vehicle for his moon mission was fired from a huge gun but that was unconvincing. His submarine was powered by electricity extracted from the sea. Some have not yet and that is reason enough for a closer look at everything he wrote. Many of Verne''s fiction have turned into fact since. The US Naval Institute Press has, for instance, sponsored a special annotated edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. ![]() This adds to the impetus from various directions for a fuller reassessment of Jules Verne, the man and his works. In France, 2005 is being observed as the Year of Jules Verne. And this is not Verne''s only posthumous book. The manuscript was discovered by Verne''s grandson in an old trunk and was published on March 24, 1905. Hetzel argued that a fax machine, sky rail, gas-fuelled automobiles in the book on Paris might appear too fanciful to readers and the book could run the risk of lying mostly unsold. Verne wrote his Paris in the Twentieth Century in the same year as Five Weeks in a Balloon. Yet, Verne''s publisher chose to remain careful to the end. The book, published in 1865 when Verne was 38, was an instant hit with the readers and more than 50 books appeared in the next 40 years. Verne''s first science fiction, Five Weeks in a Balloon had to undergo many excisions advised by Hetzel. His publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, could never quite shed his doubts about the commercial wisdom of packing so much science into fiction. Verne absorbed an astonishing volume of scientific knowledge by ceaselessly poring over books, newspapers, magazines and reports emanating from erudite societies. Verne could no longer be ignored as a non-scientist who had studied law for a career and tried to earn a living as a broker in the Paris stock market. All this could not have been a mere coincidence. ![]() In 1968, Apollo-8 rose from Florida, attained a speed of 24,200 miles per hour, went round the moon and splashed down in the Pacific. In his From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1869) Verne wrote about an aluminium spacecraft rising from Florida at a speed of 24,400 miles an hour, going round the moon and returning to earth in the waters of the Pacific. ![]() But they proved a humbling experience for many Americans when they were asked to take a look at what Verne had calculated in his fiction 100 years ago. The Apollo moon missions in the sixties were a significant achievement. Now there is talk of ''rehabilitating'' Jules Verne, especially in America. Though America is a pioneer in most modern scientific developments, Verne has consistently been relegated to the shelves for young readers alongside the works of Baron von Munchhausen, the aristocratic German raconteur whose extravagant unbelievable tales won him the sobriquet "the baron of lies". America''s NASA has not consciously borrowed the appellation from the French writer — its scientists have never consi-dered Verne as any sort of inspiration. More than 100 years later, the Americans named the command module of their Apollo-11, their lunar landing mission, Columbia. Was Jules Verne, the prodigious and most popular science fiction writer of all times, also a clairvoyant? In From the Earth to the Moon he named his imaginary super-cannon which would transport three men to the moon orbit Columbiad.
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