Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon

It is often said that Jules Verne wrote about technology while H.G. Wells wrote about people. Between the two originators of the Scientific Romance, the Briton is regarded as writing social, political and religious tracts veiled in thin scientific premises of Martian invasions, cruel vivisection, and crueler eugenic fantasies. Verne's domain was that of technology and discovery, writing carefully researched stories about the phenomena of science and industry.

Wherever this assessment stands in relation to Wells (he may have been the one to propagate it), it is not entirely accurate in regards to the elder Frenchman. He certainly did write about technology and industry, science and discovery, and did so excellently. That was not the limit of his genius, however. Verne's eye pierced not only into the future of technology, but also how technology affects and is affected by society.

One of Verne's earliest novels was of this sort... In fact, the largely accurate vision of metropolitan alienation presented by Paris in the Twentieth Century was so drear that publisher Jules Hetzel refused to release the book. It would not occupy store shelves until 1994. While Verne was dissuaded from further depressing and pessimistic work (at least until Hetzel died and Verne became a much older, more embittered man), he continued to inject insightful commentary into his stories of adventure. From the Earth to the Moon, written only two years after Paris in the Twentieth Century, is a perfect example of Verne's approach to the subject. What we find within its pages is not so much the story of a lunar expedition as a hysterical and biting satire of the American military-industrial complex.

All Aboard for the Moon on Simpson's Electric Gun

The following article appeared in the July 12, 1908 edition of the San Francisco Call newspaper. Not unlike modern science journalism, a relatively modest discovery - W.S. Simpson's electric gun, capable of launching a projectile 300 miles - is inflated to world-shattering proportions.

"Men could abide on the moon for a time," says Professor Dodge. "In thick walled, airtight houses, and could walk out of doors in airtight divers’ suits. Scientists would find in the wastes a fresh field for exploration. Astronomers could plant their telescopes there, free from their most serious hindrance, the earth’s atmosphere. Tourists of the wealthy and adventurous class would not fail to visit the satellite, and it is probable there are veins of precious metals, beds of diamonds and an abundance of sulphur in a world of so highly volcanic a character."

The scanned image may be clicked on for a closer look.

The Air Ship, a Musical Farce Comedy

Much like modern cinematic blockbusters, the theatrical stage of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras saw the same competition for bigger, grander, and more effects-laden productions to draw audiences. J.M. Gaites rose to the challenge, penning The Air Ship in 1899.

Señor Zorro, the Masked Avenger

The archetype of the avenging swashbuckler is a very old one. Ballads of Robin Hood go back to the 15th century, and there were certainly others before him... Characters of great daring and great romance who rob from the rich and give to the poor, and otherwise seek to right wrongs and fight injustice against which others are cowardly or impotent. The legacy of the swashbuckler has distilled into the modern superhero, the Captain Americas and Batmans who fight the fight that properly constituted authority cannot. Though the swashbuckler archetype is an old one, some of its most popular and well-known manifestations are not as old as some might think. The lineage of Batman - the dilettante whose secret identity is the mask - goes back at least to Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel, the 1905 novel set in Revolutionary France. His more direct ancestor is Johnston McCulley's black-clad avenger of Alta California, Señor Zorro, who was created in 1919. 

Walter R. Booth's "Airship" Trilogy

By 1909, Scientific Romances were well established in film. The "Romance" part often overshadowed the "Scientific" part, however. Georges Méliès, one of the most innovative minds in movies in the first decade of the 20th century, was most interested fantasies with a Vernian gloss rather than a straight attempt at serious speculative storytelling. In many cases, science was merely a just-so explanation for phenomena that would otherwise be attributed to magic or ghosts. For example, The Electric Hotel (1905) by Segundo de Chomón is an otherwise typical haunted house trick film, only this time it's electric conveniences gone awry.

Walter R. Booth was a magician turned trick filmmaker, like Georges Méliès in many respects. with the same preoccupations. 1901's The Magic Sword, for instance, is a straightforward fantasy story. An Over-Incubated Baby from the same year is more of a trick film with a mad science premise. But come 1909, Booth was interested in a much different project. Rather than a humourous trick film, The Airship Destroyer is a remarkably serious and prescient attempt at Scientific Romances in the vein of H.G. Wells' War in the Air, published the preceding year.        

This film is a remarkably prophetic one-reel opening chapter to a trio of conceptually similar films that includes The Aerial Submarine and The Aerial Anarchists. In it, a thinly-veiled Germany descends on the British coast with a fleet of invincible dirigibles which can only be brought down by the genius of an inventor and his guided aerial torpedo. More authentically like Verne and Wells, Booth's prognostications were based on solid projections of existing technology, as both Zeppelin's and the Wright Brothers' crafts had debuted and entered into commuter and military service by 1909. A scant few years thereafter, Europe would descend into violent mechanized warfare and The Airship Destroyer would become horrifying reality. It was even re-released in 1915 to boost morale. 

Extract from The Airship Destroyer.

A year later, Booth released The Aerial Submarine, in which a pair of children are kidnapped by high-tech pirates inspired loosely by Jules Verne's Robur. From beneath the waves they strike out at passing cruise ships, looting their cargoes. When the submarines of the Royal Navy catch their scent, the pirates take to the air and drop shells on their hapless pursuers. It is only when a careless engineer causes disaster that the world has a hope of salvation from the aero-pirates. It is much less serious than The Airship Destroyer, returning to the cinematic genre's more fanciful trends.

Extract from The Aerial Submarine.

Unfortunately, the third film in the series, The Aerial Anarchists (1911), is a lost film. No footage is known to exist, and all that is known is a vague synopsis that mentions a bombing of St. Paul's Cathedral and the destruction of a railway over a chasm.

Both The Airship Destroyer and The Aerial Submarine can be viewed from British ISPs on the BFI Player website.

Rose Marie, Renfrew, and the Canadian Mountie on Film

Today's special feature is part of the O Canada! Blogathon hosted by Speakeasy and Silver Screenings. Click on the banner above to read more about the legacy of motion pictures in the True North Strong and Free!

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Hollywood's "golden age" of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties never wanted for stories of adventure set in the rugged wilderness of the mighty Northwoods. Between An Acadian Elopement in 1907 and the 1975 publication of Canadian historian Pierre Burton's damning Hollywood's Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image, 575 films were produced featuring mountainous and snowy locales populated by trappers, loggers and the women of disrepute who loved them. More than half of these, over 250, focused on that most iconic figure of Canadian history, the Mountie.

CANADA!

Harry Grant Dart's The Explorigator

When he began the amazing story of The Explorigator on Sunday, May 3rd, 1908, Harry Grant Dart was already well on his way to becoming an established and respected illustrator. After serving as a sketch artist in Cuba for the New York World paper, he assumed responsibility as its art director. It was for them that he developed the idea of The Explorigator as a response to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, running in the rival New York Herald.  

Harry Grant Dart's Futuristic Air Travel

One of the great, famous images of retro-futurism uncovered by the Internet's digital archaeologists in the last decade, Harry Grant Dart's painting of an Edwardian lady piloting an airship has become something of an icon. Originally published as the cover to the October 1908 edition of All-Story Monthly, it builds on some of the themes of Scientific Romance that Dart had already been exploring in his comic strip The Explorigator earlier that year. Nor was he alien to making social commentary, as in the case of an illustration for Puck that critiqued the movement to allow women to smoke in public. That illustration made the rounds again in 2014, where it was (erroneously) lampooned as an example of anti-suffrage histrionics. This particular issue of All-Story included the Scientific Romance The Master of the World by Charles Francis Bourke (not Jules Verne).

Dart's cover in published form.

Carousel Guest Blog - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

As some may have noticed, I messed up the new schedule and posted two weeks in a row, the last time being last week. In lieu of what should have been today's post, I humbly present a guest post I wrote for Carousel, the official blog of Skyhorse Publishing. They were kind enough to invite me to write a piece on their recent republication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Follow this link to read the article!

The Victorian Invention of Christmas

On the odd occasion when I am asked what the greatest invention of the Victorian Era was, I tend to step sideways on it. Yes, various industrial, scientific, entertainment, and transportation technologies are interesting, but I think the best invention of the Victorian Era is the middle class. The idea of the bulk of persons in a society standing between obscene wealth and dire poverty, being able to enjoy opportunity and the fruits of their education and labour, to experience personal freedom as a birthright rather than a class privilege, is a remarkable idea virtually unprecedented in human history. For my second favourite Victorian invention, I may have to say Christmas.

Victorian card of Father Christmas
in his traditional green coat.

Scientific Romances in the Atomic Age

The resolution to the War in the Pacific in 1945 threw a wholly new anxiety onto the shoulders of the world: the heretofore impossible spectre of actual global annihilation. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki culminated a trend begun with The Great War. In that first conflict, the "Christian Century" of infinite moral progress was crushed beneath the violence of technological warfare predicted by the likes of H.G. Wells, George Tomkyns Chesney, and the other 19th century writers of doomsday invasion stories. Often they predicted an apocalyptic outcome to the oncoming war, but humanity's execution was blessedly stayed in 1919. Even with advances in tank, aeroplane and explosive technologies, truly obliterating humanity was beyond humanity's power.

Then along came The Bomb.

To make the situation that much more dire, the end of the War in Europe also furnished a new and powerful opponent. No sooner were Germany and Japan brought to heel than the Soviet Union filled the vacuum, being a more expansive and more horrific regime than the two villains of World War II combined. Furthermore, Stalin also possessed The Bomb and, under Khrushchev (with help from Castro), the animosity between the USSR and the USA nearly led to Armageddon. While both sides built up their capacity for mutually assured destruction, proxy wars were held in Southeast Asia and in the ideological realm of outer space.

Our ability to smash atoms and potential to harness them for a new technological age, as well as the Space Race and its naive utopian promises, formed the perfect backdrop for what would later be recognized as the Golden Age of Science Fiction in film. The Great War that closed out the Victorian-Edwardian Era also closed out the genre of Scientific Romances; stories of adventure in far-flung places that shared the thrill of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and colonial exploration to a pre-film society, written by the likes of Jules Verne, Garrett P. Serviss, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Camille Flammarion, Edward Everett Hale, and Edward Ellis. Between the wars, the only books of Verne's that were adapted to film were his spy adventures like Michael Strogoff, with a solitary exception in 1929's The Mysterious Island that had more in common with its own time period than Verne's original novel. Science Fiction, properly speaking, took over during the interwar period, in everything from serious meditations on how science and technology may affect society in such works as Metropolis (1927) and Things to Come (1936) down to the Pulpy action-adventure of Flash Gordon (1936) and The Phantom Empire (1935). This nascent realm of Art Deco and radium transformed into the world of Googie and the atom after the Second World War.

Nevertheless, people old enough to beget the Baby Boom were themselves old enough to remember those years before the First World War, or remember the stories told by their own parents. The Gay Nineties re-surged as a reassuring nostalgia in film and places like Disneyland. One user of the Tiki Central forum referred to Tiki lounge culture as the "emotional bomb shelters of the Atomic Age," and the same could be said of retreat into bygone days of bustled ladies in feathered hats and suffragette sashes, men in seersucker and handlebar moustaches, horseless carriages, pennyfarthing bicycles, Queen Anne revival architecture, barbershop quartets, and marching bands playing in town square. The authors of the Victorian-Edwardian Era came along with it. In particular, those writers of Scientific Romances became suitable for reinterpretation as modern Science Fiction.

Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

After several years of production, design and location shooting, Walt Disney released his first Hollywood produced live-action motion picture in 1954. If the advertising was to be believed, it was in fact the mightiest motion picture of them all. Considering that the film was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this is a credible claim. 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, starring James Mason as Nemo and Kirk Douglas as Ned Land alongside Peter Lorre as Conseil and Paul Lukas as Prof. Arronax, is perhaps the single most important modern film in the genre of Scientific Romance. 20,000 Leagues came to the silver screen in a post-Hiroshima, pre-Sputnik era when Atomic Age Science Fiction was the darling of young and old imaginations alike (not to mention drive-in theatre patrons). Between voyaging to forbidden planets and fighting off prehistoric monsters, filmmakers turned their attention back to the Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The first of these was George Pal's War of the Worlds, which updated Wells' tale by placing it squarely in the modern day.

Following Treasure Island and a series of three Mediaeval historical dramas shot in England with money tied up during the Second World War, Disney sought another live-action project for production in his studios in Burbank. In doing so, he revived his childhood love for Jules Verne. His concerns, in making the film, were very much the stuff of adulthood, however.

Walt Disney and the Gay Nineties

In a 1997 exhibition of the same name, scholar Karal Ann Marling aptly described Walt Disney's theme park ventures as "The Architecture of Reassurance." Through gingerbread houses, Western stockades, futuristic rocketships, and fairy tale villages, visitors to the newly christened Disneyland in the Fifties and Sixties could find nostalgia, comfort, and hope for the future through the uncertainties of America's changing culture and global position in the post-war milieu. Complimenting Walt Disney's Disneyland, the theme park, was Walt Disney's Disneyland the television series. Each week, Walt's comforting public persona would introduce updates on the theme park, behind-the-scenes programs for newly arriving films, and reruns of past cinematic successes, each themed to a different section of the park, be it Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, or Tomorrowland. When first unveiled to the world, "Disneyland" was not merely a theme park or a TV show or motion pictures, but a state of mind. The gateway to this mentality was Main Street U.S.A. and the reassuring myth of the Gay Nineties.

BBC's The Secret Agent

Produced by the BBC and making its home video debut in North America on Acorn TV, The Secret Agent is a three-episode adaptation of Joseph Conrad's tale about The Great Game and its human cost. Toby Jones (Captain America's Armin Zola) stars as Anton Verloc, the owner of a pornography shoppe in London's Soho who moonlights as an anarchist agitator who moonlights as a Russian spy. His chief, the Russian ambassador (David Dawson) is tired of paying their hapless agent for inaction. The international anarcho-communist movement is threatening the stability of governments across Europe, and thus the ambassador wishes to provoke Scotland Yard into bringing its full weight against England's would-be revolutionaries. Verloc is assigned to frame his anarchist cell with a heinous crime: the bombing of the Greenwich Observatory.

What follows is a descent into an utterly bleak moral landscape of madness and ideology manipulated by damnable political forces. The anarcho-communists are a futile lot of bickering "old men" who talk of revolution while wasting their lives on petty seductions. Only one offers any help to Verloc, known only as "The Professor" (Ian Hart), a nihilistic maniac frustrated with the cell's unwillingness to actually get its hands dirty. The cell is under the watch of Chief Inspector Heat (Stephen Grahame), who has nothing but disdain for their foolish hobby... Until he discovers that The Professor's wired up overcoat has turned him into a walking bomb. That is his first clue that there is more going on than impotent political bloviating.

Essential to Verloc's plot is his brother-in-law Stevie (Charlie Hamblett). Believing Verloc to be a decent and simple man, Winnie (Vicky McClure) married him for security rather than love. The security he provided allowed her, her mother, and her brother to get away from the abusive hand of her father. This was especially important for Stevie, who suffers from a developmental disability. The cowardly Verloc, who cannot bear to commit an actual act of terrorism, sees in Stevie an easy dupe to commit the terrible act. Yet the plan goes awry, and the lives of everyone spiral downwards to the abyss.

Charles Golightly and his Steam Rocket

Man in Space, the classic 1954 episode of the Walt Disney's Disneyland television series that helped launch the American space program, begins with a brief history of rocket science that veers from Newtonian physics and Chinese fireworks to the various silly and ill-conceived adventures of the Victorian Era to the successes of the German V-2 program. Nestled into it is a mention of "Charles Golightly," a British inventor who took out a patent on steam-powered rockets in 1841.

But who was Charles Golightly? Did he exist? And did he ever build his rocket?

Universal Studios' Dracula

It practically goes without saying that the landscape of cinema history would be radically different had the classic, 1931 version of Dracula never been produced, or been as successful as it was. The film catapulted Bela Lugosi to fame and precipitated Boris Karloff's Frankenstein later that same year, beginning a 30-year legacy of Horror, Thriller and Science Fiction began at Universal Studios. It also cemented the image of the undead lord as a darkly seductive Hungarian in a dinner suit.

Given its seminal status, Dracula provides a clinic in what makes those creaky old Universal films so wonderful. What is it hiding in those shadows on monochrome celluloid that resonates so deeply with viewers, now almost 80 years on? In the North American horror tradition pre-1960, the horror and blood isn't necessarily the point of the horror film. The exploits of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., and Vincent Price are not merely a parade of "mixed up faces", as Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest J. Ackerman summed up the mainstream view of horror. Instead, through these films, we but up against the wonder and mysticism of the sublime in all its overwhelming, humbling, astonishing, horrifying glory.

The Sublimity of the Universal Studios Monsters

Nothing is so efficacious for horror as the bygone monochrome of the truly silver screen. Only black-and-white held deep enough shadows for monsters to lurk. From within fog-choked forests, immense alpine passes, ancient tombs, and ruined castles, they bid us welcome, show us what it means to trespass in the realms of God, embroil us in the cosmic battle over the human soul, and did it with unparalleled glamour.   
And nobody did it quite as well as Universal Studios. The films of the German Expressionists were beautiful in their artistic, European fashion, and they went on to fuel Universal's own horror pictures. Other films and filmmakers rose to the occasion - White Zombie with Bela Lugosi, Island of Lost Souls with Charles Laughton, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Fredric March, and even the times Mickey Mouse tussled with skeleton dancers and mad doctors - But none matched Universal for sheer output, enjoyment and quality. Hailing from the Silent Era to the Atomic Age, the legacy of the Universal Studios Monsters endures to this day.

Georges Méliès' Le Voyage dans la Lune

It is one of the most iconic images of cinema history: the Man in the Moon being hit in the eye by a steel and rivet rocket capsule. It captures, at the same time, everything quaint and fantastical about silent film and Scientific Romances. Though lasting a mere 14 minutes, Georges Méliès' 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (English: A Trip to the Moon) transports viewers to an amazing world where shimmering stars are beautiful women, the astronomer and the astrologer are indistinguishable, and all that is needed to reach the moon is a healthy dose of magic and a very large gun.

What Are Scientific Romances?

On the day I started writing this article, a warm fire crackled in the hearth, snow fell outside the window, and a cup of English tea steamed at my elbow. A setting like that — a cozy, human spot with friends and family near by — really puts me in the mood for just one thing: Science Fiction. You heard right. Science Fiction. Of course, I don't mean just any Science Fiction. I don't mean the sort of thing where characters named "Zargon" from places called "Hydra-Gamma III" listen to bald-headed creepozoids in silver BVDs rant about "pure logic." No, the kind of science fiction I'm thinking of is different. Warmer. Richer. More human. On this kind of science fiction adventure, you don't want skin-tight leotards and chrome bikinis. You want big wool sweaters, hiking books, English tweed and pith helmets, with ankle-length skirts and parasols for the ladies. Yes, this is a special brand of science fiction — my favorite kind. Ever since I was a kid, I've always loved the sort of movie where a proper Victorian professor journeys from the smoke-filled adventurer's clubs of London to some impossible lost world in his own gilded or wrought-iron invention. The kind of story that somehow seems to bypass some of the dead-ends of certain other science fiction; seems to allow us to ponder the kind of mysteries science fiction explores so well without asking us to leave our roots in the past behind. I loved it then, and I still love it today.

These words, penned by Rod Bennett in his article Voyages Extraordinaires on Film: A Survey of Fireside Science Fiction, are perhaps the richest summary of that strange, delightful, fantastic, but all-too brief genre called "Scientific Romance."

Welcome to Voyages Extraordinaires, Volume II!

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the newly refreshed Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age weblog!

For longtime readers of this weblog, I hope you'll enjoy this new incarnation and the new opportunities for content that it affords. For those of you who are not so familiar, allow me to describe what it is you'll find in the premier electro-tele-kinetographic journal of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances, Retro-Futurism, and Victoriana.