Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad

In Japan, riding a steam train through outer space is a melancholy symbol of the human journey. Like the gentle drift of the sakura petal, the whistle of a train means a transition in life. That human quality... those melancholy, bittersweet coming of age lessons... were inherited from renowned writer Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad, whose own life was a tragic and all-too brief spark snuffed out early.  

Published posthumously in 1934 as part of his collected works, Ginga Tetsudou no Yoru (translated variously as Night on the Galactic Railroad, Night of the Milky Way Train, The Celestial Railroad, and Fantasy Railroad in the Stars) underwent constant revision since its genesis in 1924 and none of the versions available to date are "complete" so far as the author's final wishes go. Nevertheless, being incomplete in itself gives Night on the Galactic Railroad its own poignancy. 

Its most immediate grounding comes with the death of Miyazawa's sister Toshi in 1922. Kenji left his home in Hanamaki, Iwate prefecture, the year before out of disgust with his family's business and friction with its patriarch. The son of a pawnbroker, Kenji became ever more sensitive to the disparity between his family and the surrounding farmers from whom his family gained its wealth. He converted to the more activist Nichiren sect of Buddhism, drawing him into a protracted conflict with his father until he left in 1921. Sadly, he returned to his sister's deathbed. Until his death from pneumonia in 1933, Miyazawa stayed in the Hanamaki area, becoming an author, schoolteacher and improver of conditions for the people of the region. 

His first work, The Restaurant of Many Orders, was self-published in 1924, followed by as many volumes of story and verse as he could save his wages up to print. At the Hanamaki Agriculture School he emphasized personal experience, pulling his students out of the classroom and into the fields more often than he let them sit at a desk. Miyazawa strove to inculcate an appreciation of nature, geology, and astronomy in the young, as well as an appreciation of the arts. Music, poetry and theatre were also subjects which he encouraged, organizing public recitals of works created by the students. In 1926 he gave up teaching at the school to form the Rasu Farmers Association. Its object was to modernize the way of life of farmers, in addition to fostering scientific and cultural pursuits. Among his activities, he introduced new and hardier strains of rice, as well as hosting European classical music listening parties on his gramophone, one of the only (if not the only) in Hanamaki. 

His personal philosophy is exemplified in his poem Ame ni mo Makezu, discovered in a notebook after his death:

Unbeaten by the rain 
Unbeaten by the wind
Bested by neither snow nor summer heat
Strong of body
Free of desire
Never angry
Always smiling quietly
Dining daily on four cups of brown rice
Some miso and a few vegetables
Observing all things
Leaving myself out of account
But remembering well
Living in a small, thatched-roof house
In the meadow beneath a canopy of pines
Going east to nurse the sick child
Going west to bear sheaves of rice for the weary mother
Going south to tell the dying man there is no cause for fear
Going north to tell those who fight to put aside their trifles
Shedding tears in time of drought
Wandering at a loss during the cold summer
Called useless by all
Neither praised
Nor a bother
Such is the person
I wish to be

Ame ni mo Makezu became an anthem for the whole of Japan in 2011, in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which especially hit Miyazawa's prefecture of Iwate hard. It was famously read by actor Ken Watanabe in remembrance of the disaster.  

Immediately after the death of Toshi, Kenji took a trip to the far northern island of Sakhalin. Long hours aboard the railways running across Japan left him with much time to reflect on feelings of death and loss, regret, loneliness, true happiness and that which makes for a well-lived life. Those reflections distilled into Night on the Galactic Railroad. 

The novella opens with Giovanni, a boy from an impoverished family, sitting in school at the mercy of his tormentors. Because of his mother's illness and his own need to work to get them by, he has been unable to make connections and spend time with his classmates. The result is his desperate loneliness at their cruel hands. One insult they get a great deal of mileage out of the absence of his father, a sailor. Giovanni looks forward to the return of an idealized stable and positive influence in his life. His classmates, on the other hand, are convinced of the rumour that he went off on an illegal hunt for otter furs and has been arrested. Constantly they taunt Giovanni with the question of whether his dad will bring him back an otter-skin coat. His only friend is Campanella, one of the most popular kids. Giovanni and Campanella's fathers were friends and the two grew together in a pitying sort of way. Campanella doesn't really need Giovanni, but he recognizes that Giovanni needs him. This friendship leads to a shared trip aboard the Galactic Railroad on the night of the Centaurus Festival. 

After being taunted again by the other kids, Giovanni fled from the riverbanks where lanterns were being floated to lie alone on a hilltop, gazing at the stars. Suddenly a light flashed, a voice cried out "Milky Way Station!" and Giovanni found himself inside the carriage of a steam train, sitting across from a soaking wet Campanella. Next stop, Swan Station in the constellation of Cygnus. The Milky Way, that great band of stars of which every society has some significant mythology, is known in Japan as "Amano-gawa," the "Heavenly River." In Miyazawa's prose it becomes a glittering river flanked by silvery pampas grass and star-like beacons. Each constellation is a station along the railway, with its own lessons. 

At Cyngus, the pair meet a palaentologist digging up the remains of a prehistoric cow. He exclaims that the excavation is necessary to demonstrate a multi-layered understanding of reality, poetic and scientific. Other people, without that appreciation, may just see "wind and water and empty sky." At Scorpio they hear the story of the scorpion who spent his life feeding on others but fled into a well when something came along to eat him. Fearful at his cowardice and lamenting his useless death, he prayed to be somehow made useful for others and became the constellation burning bright. The arrival of a group of passengers from a tragic sunken ship begets a discussion about necessity, God, the nature of happiness and the ability to reign one's fate. When the train arrives at the Northern Cross, the former passengers of this ocean liner which struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic are instructed to depart... God is calling them to Heaven. Giovanni and Campanella stay behind, the former pledging to ride the rails with his friend forever. Some destinies, however, are unavoidable and all that matters is to make the time one has mean the most it possibly can.

In 1985, the story was adapted to an anime feature film that is the most accessible version available to the Western world. The symbolism and themes of the film version are all but impenetrable, but nevertheless, it is a strikingly beautiful "renaissance" tale befitting the renaissance man that was Kenji Miyazawa. Because Night on the Galactic Railroad is such a short novella, the film is practically verbatim. It does toy with the aesthetics of the story, most notably in its depiction of the two boys as anthropomorphic cats. 

The complete Night on the Galactic Railroad with English dubbing.

Just as obtuse, but also just as satisfying, is Spring and Chaos (1996) by Shoji Kawamori of Macross and Escaflowne fame. A biographical film about Miyazawa, the human actors are replaced with cats in homage to Night on the Galactic Railroad and the film is decidedly non-linear and highly artistic. In fact, unless one has the benefit of an intimate understanding of Miyazawa through other biographical resources, and a working knowledge of his stories, much of the film is reduced to appreciating abstract animation art for its own sake. Like other biographies of universally (or at least nationally) well-known figures, the specific historical facts aren't as interesting or as necessary as the insight into the mind of the figure that a new film may reveal. At least in regards to this topic, the insights are visually stunning. The creation of Night on the Galactic Railroad is symbolically illustrated by a train carrying Miyazawa's sister into a clockwork underworld. Images of this clockwork underworld, through which spirits drift between gears emblazoned with Buddhist icons, figure throughout. Night on the Galactic Railroad and the resolution of Miyzawa's inner turmoils are climatically realized in the most magnificent cosmic steam train launch in cinema. Imagine a pair of steam trains, one black and the other white, rising up from the earth like space shuttles, plumes of smoke in their wake, lifting into the evening sky and intertwining like dragons or strands of DNA, all to a choral crescendo. This is the celestial steam train flight to meet and transcend all.   

The complete English subtitled version of Spring and Chaos.

Yet Miyazawa was not merely a poet. He was the epitome of Scientific Romanticism, for whom a scientific understanding of nature was a vehicle to its transcendental appreciation. It is only fitting, then, that his work became the basis for a global planetarium show titled The Celestial Railroad. Though available on the small screen, it is done its greatest turn by seeing it as it was meant to be seen. Animated by digital artist Yutaka Kagaya with music by brother Rei Kagaya, it is a rare example of overdone fantasy-style art done right. The luminous qualities of the Milky Way described by Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad are translated perfectly, then increased to tremendous proportions. 

In order to familiarize English-speaking audiences, the dubbed version of The Celestial Railroad only partially adapts the narrative while explaining a great deal about Miyazawa, the book, and the astronomical facts underlying it. Much of the symbolism is revealed as having its basis in true constellations, justifying its playing in scientific institutions. Kagaya also brings other elements of the story back down to their historical precedents. For example, Miyazawa describes individual stars as being triangular signposts. The 1985 film abstracts these into flying neon shapes. The Celestial Railroad, on the other hand, draws them directly from historical surveying posts. Unfortunately, The Celestial Railroad was produced in 2006, and that is an eternity in the market of planetarium shows. One may have to content themselves with what is found online.

The complete Celestial Railroad with English fansubbing.

The soundtrack to The Celestial Railroad is beautiful and melancholy, but few Japanese composers are of the rank of Joe Hisaishi. Most famous for his accompaniment to Hayao Miyazaki's films, Hisaishi composed his own concept album to the novel in 1996. The title - Nokto De La Galaksia Fervojo - employs Esperanto, the invented "universal language" that captivated Miyazawa and figures throughout adaptations of his work. Like many advocates for the language, Miyazawa also believed that Esperanto could unite humanity as a universal second language. Signage in the 1985 anime film is also written in Esperanto. A familiar concept through Miyazawa's work is "Ihatov," which is understood to be his home region of Iwate translated into Esperanto. However, his Ihatov represents more than where he lives... It also represents a Romantic, imaginative ideal of that region and a vision for its future.  

The complete Nokto De La Galaksia Fervojo by Joe Hisaishi.

Speaking of Studio Ghibli, they have added their touch to other works of Miyazawa over time. In 1982, before the creation of the studio, eventual co-founder Isao Takahata directed Gauche the Cellist, based on Miyazawa's story about a musician unwittingly trained by the creatures of nature. In 2006, Ghibli background painter Kazuo Oga directed his first and only film, The Night of Taneyamagahara. The story demonstrates Miyazawa's enlightened comprehension of nature full of life and animated beings, including the plants themselves.

Trailer for Gauche the Cellist. 

The complete The Night of Taneyamagahara with English subtitles.

Where Kenji's work has inspired musicians like Joe Hisaishi, we only know of one song actually written by him. Hoshi Meguri No Uta is a simple, lullaby-like tune that outlines a trip through outer space, complimenting Night on the Galactic Railroad very well:

Akai medama no sasori
Hirogeta washi no tsubasa
Aoi medama no koinu
Hikari no hebi no toguro
ORION wa takaku utai
Tsuyu to shimoto o otosu

ANDOROMEDA no kumo wa
Sakana no kuchi no katachi
Ooguma no ashi o kita ni
Itsutsu nobashita tokoro
Koguma no hitai no ue wa
Sora no meguri no meate

The scorpion with eyes of red

The eagle's wings outstretched

The little dog with eyes of blue

The coils of the snake of light

High above, Orion sings

Felling the dew and the branches

The clouds of Andromeda

Are the shape of a fish's mouth

If you extend the length of the Great Bear's paw

Five times northwards

Above the Little Bear's forehead

Is the guide to our tour of the skies

The song has been covered countless times and is a favourite of Japanese performers. It closed out the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics and has appeared in numerous anime, including the visual novel Planetarian and its anime adaptation.

Hoshi Meguri no Uta from the Planetarian visual novel OST.

Closing ceremonies of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. The

performance of Hoshi Meguri no Uta and Clair de Lune, honouring

the torch being passed from Tokyo to the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics,

begins at approximately 2:53:00. 

The appeal of Kenji Miyazawa lies primarily in his distinctively Japanese parallel to the project of Scientific Romanticism. As originally conceived, Romanticism was a rejection  of Enlightenment values of pure rationalism and objectivity. It rejected both the atomistic individualism of the Enlightenment as well as its conviction in the "scientific" organization of society, preferring concepts of individualism rooted in experiential and creative genius as well as a sense of community grounded in ethnic, "folk" identity. Romanticism placed emphasis on the personal, experiential, emotional, intuitive, and the creative.

However, rare minds came along that proposed a synthesis of this thesis and antithesis. The "Scientific Romanticism" of writers like Jules Verne understood that science and technology could be vehicles to the transcendental appreciation of nature. The lone Romantic genius could be a man of science. This is typified by Captain Nemo, the lone genius whose Nautilus is a technological capsule for exploring the romance of the ocean depths while carrying within it all that is good and beautiful of the surface world. 

Miyazawa, half-a-century later, is one of those rare minds. The contemporary, unromantic industrial technology of the steam train becomes, in his hands, a vehicle to traverse the great Celestial River. And more than that, it becomes a psychopomp, a vehicle to traverse the liminal space between life and death. A journey on this clanking, smoke-belching mechanism is a journey through the meaning of life. Likewise, an excavation for fossils becomes an excavation through the psychological layers of human existence.

All this he does through a distinctively Japanese lens. He embraces learning, science, music, the arts, and the fashions of the West - one of the most famous photos of him is in a bowler hat and overcoat - but like his country, these were carefully embraced and synthesized with core Japanese cultural and spiritual ideals. His visions of animate nature are less in the European or American transcendental vein and instead rooted deeply in Shinto's worship of the kami, the gods and goddesses of nature. Whereas Romanticism in Europe yielded Romantic Nationalism and Gothic Revivalism, comparable ideals drew Miyazawa to Nichiren Buddhism. Founded by the 13th-century Buddhist priest after whom it was named, Nichiren Buddhism was a reforming movement outlining the need to move beyond formal ritualism and abstract purity to live out Buddhism "with the body" or through one's whole life. It was convinced of the primacy of the Lotus Sutra scriptures and the belief that if a nation returned to the Lotus Sutra, casting out or abandoning heretical forms of Buddhism, then the nation would enjoy peace and justice in the present world. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Kenji's time, this lead Nichiren Buddhism into a kind of Japanese ultranationalism mirroring the development of the European nation-states and lead-in to World War One. Under different interpretations, Nichiren also provided a socialist, pacifist, humanist counter-movement that was less popular and often actively persecuted, also mirroring the Transcendentalists of the 19th century United States.    

Kenji's work is also lent a mystique through his early death, and happens in many cases. But unlike a James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, Miyazawa died sacrificially living out his ideals in service to others. Japan's increasingly militarized government closed the Rasu Farmer's Association down in 1928, after which Kenji contracted an ongoing case of pneumonia. He essentially worked himself to death selling crushed limestone to farmers, in the hope that this meager job could in some way improve their crops and lives. He was initially buried at his family's plot in a Pure Land Buddhist temple, but when the family converted to Nichiren Buddhism in 1951, he was reinterred at the Nichiren temple that he himself had made the case for building. Kenji's greatest fame came after his death, also like many great artists, when his friends posthumously published his many stories and poems, including Night on the Galactic Railroad. 

Despite his humble origins and early death, Kenji Miyazawa's expansive mind lives on as one of Japan's national treasures and an enduring legacy of beauty, curiousity, and romance for the entire world. 

Cyrano de Bergerac: Grandfather of Voyages Extraordinaires

Though regarded as the father of Scientific Romances, and therefore the grandfather of Science Fiction, Jules Verne was not without his antecedents. Going far back, very far, into the earliest of literature that could be considered a forerunner of the genre, Verne looks to a fellow countryman. He is none other than the man most famous for his nose, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Published posthumously in 1657, de Bergerac was the first Frenchman to take a fantastic journey to the Moon. The Other World: The Societies and Governments of the Moon is one of the first of the Enlightenment satires that would evolve, over the following centuries, into Voyages Extraordinaires.

The advent of the Enlightenment provided two of the most fundamental ingredients to speculative fiction. The first was a fresh breeze of scientific inquiry borne out of Galileo's celestial discoveries. Through the use of his telescope, Galileo was able to chart the motions of Jupiter's moons and Venus' phases, overturning the Aristotelian model of a geocentric cosmos. Johannes Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo, wrote up his scientific speculations in a novel entitled Somnium, published in 1634. In Somnium, an Icelandic sleeper is spirited away by lunar demons through magical processes during a solar eclipse. From his vantage point on the Moon, he is able to observe the phases of the Earth in a rousing defense of Copernican astronomy.

The second ingredient was a heady air of liberty that allowed social critics to write freely their observations on humanity. The new worlds opened up to the imagination by Galileo's telescope provided the perfect staging ground for commentary. Like much Science Fiction ever since, alien races become proxies for our own foibles and models for our own possibilities. De Bergerac's Other World is one such tale.

Cyrano de Bergerac lived fast and not for very long. He died at the age of 36 by a freak accident, after a falling beam in a friend's house crushed him and left him too sickly to survive an onslaught of disease. Before that, he was a renowned duellist and soldier during the Thirty Years War. He was a poet and possibly homosexual, which leaves open the question of the famous Roxane, for which was supposed to hold a torch. Like many details of de Bergerac's life, the love triangle between him, Roxane and Christian was fabricated by playwright Edmond Rostand. This includes his nose, which by accounts was large but not of the size suggested in later legend. Most likely, de Bergerac's great romance was with fellow libertin writer and poet Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, after which the two viciously attcked each other with the quill. Besides writing public satirical tracts against each other, de Bergerac went so far as to send florid death threats.

De Bergerac, like so many "Freethinkers", was a better believer in Reason than a user of it. Nevertheless, he was a biting critic of his times. Making use of Galileo's new worlds, he took a fanciful visit to the Moon to observe the customs of its strange people. Like Kepler and author Bishop Francis Godwin before him, de Bergerac was less concerned with a credible means of getting to the orb. Kepler's man was kidnapped during an eclipse, and Godwin's arrived on an airship pulled by geese. De Bergerac had a slightly more difficult time of it. His first attempt was to use bottles of dew attached to his person. As the morning light rose, so too would the dew, carrying him along. This fails and lands him, thanks to the Earth's rotation, in New France, the colony of Quebec. In Quebec - which at the time of publication was on the eve of its 50th anniversary and is today the oldest continued permanent settlement in North America - de Bergerac fashioned an airship that also failed. Finally the airship was converted into a rocket, intended for the St. Jean Baptiste Day celebrations, which conveys him to the stars.

Once on the lunar orb, Cyrano makes a series of startling discoveries: the Moon is, in fact, the Garden of Eden. After nourishing himself on the Tree of Life, he encounters Elijah and learns the history of Biblical spacefarers. Banished because of their culinary oversight Adam and Eve literally took flight to Earth. Enoch, on the other hand, was taken up to the Moon by bottling the smoke of a pious burnt sacrifice. Noah's daughter simply washed ashore after absconding with the Ark's lifeboat. Elijah used a golden chariot of his own construction, repeatedly tossing a magnetic ball into the air and letting the chariot soar upwards towards it, repeating the process until he arrived.

These are not the Moon's only inhabitants, however. After taking a bite from the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, with its ambiguous mix of omniscient fibre and ignorance-inducing peel, de Bergerac is introduced to spacefarers from the Sun who have set up their colony on La Lune. He is a bit more comfortable with these Rationalists than he is with the Biblical prophets. Godwin's astronautical pioneer also makes an appearance, when he is mistaken for a type of monkey and de Bergerac mistaken for a female of the species.

Several authors followed in the footsteps of de Bergerac. Voltaire elicited the help of aliens to satirize human self-importance in the face of a vast cosmos. Simon Tyssot de Patot critiqued religion and the arts via a lost world in 1710's Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Massé. Louis-Sébastien Mercier visited L'An 2440. Jonathan Swift took Gulliver around the planet to its many strange and varied societies. Baron Munchausen himself visited Diana several times. Washington Irving used The Conquest of the Moon as a parable of American expansionism. Fellow American George Tucker took the first steps in transforming these satires into Scientific Romances by taking a great deal more care in making plausible the means by which his persona took A Voyage to the Moon in 1827. Then there was Poe, and Verne.

De Bergerac was at work on a second story - The Societies and Governments of the Sun - when he passed away. What remains are muddled tales about his nose and his love life, and a classic ancestor to Scientific Romances. Disney recognized his contribution in the program Man in Space, where a history of rocketry includes an interlude from The Other World animated by Ward Kimball. Karel Zeman also paid respects to the poet by including him as one of the denizens of the moon, along with the explorers of Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Baron Munchausen in the film Baron Munchausen (1961).

For us, the intrepid Donald Webb has provided an English translation and annotations to The Other World: The Societies and Governments of the Moon.

Six Weeks in the Moon; or, A Trip Beyond the Zenith

Happy Days was a magazine that ran from 1894 to 1924 and published stories very much in the classic "dime novel" vein. The overwhelming number of its stories are of the "boy" type... The pages of Happy Days were replete with boy detectives, boy sheriffs, boy lawyers, boy financiers, boy industrialists, boy rangers, boy miners, boy adventurers, boys going to every corner of the world, boys running off to the circus, and boys before the sail. Rarely, the occasional scientific romance also graced it pages. 

Six Weeks in the Moon; or, A Trip Beyond the Zenith ran in Happy Days from issues 68 to 75, volume III, February 1 through March 21 of 1896. Unfortunately, issues 70, 72, and 73 are lost, cutting out several chapters of the story. What does exist is presented here. Click on the image for a larger version, right click for even bigger.

The Conversion of the Professor by George Chetwyn Griffith

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well — that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time.

This quote by the Edwardian Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton nicely articulates the central problem in George Chetwyn Griffith's The Conversion of the Professor: A Tale of the Fourth Dimension. Published in the May 1899 edition of Pearson's Magazine, the author of A Honeymoon in Space and The Angel of the Revolution introduces us to a British high society melodrama. Poor Miss Idris Lincoln, B.Sc. wishes to marry Mr. Frederick Herne, a solid, good, and faithful man though not of Miss Lincoln's intellectual caste. Standing between them is her father Professor Lincoln, who is taken with near-religious fervor for eugenic ideas. Humane entreaties of romantic passion hold no sway over the man of genius who adheres to the laws of natural selection as he understands them.

When not occupied with family drama, the esteemed professor's attentions are consumed by calculations which may open up to him the mysteries of the Fourth Dimension, that great unknown beyond our three dimensions. These explorations are oddly mystical... They are opened up not by a machine of some devising, but through symbols and sigils and equations. But by whatever means he achieves the Fourth Dimension, what he learns there will transform his life and the lives of everyone around him.

The full text of The Conversion of the Professor follows, as it was published in Pearson's Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.    

The Scientific Romances of Garrett P. Serviss

From the last quarter of the 19th century through the first quarter of the 20th, Garrett P. Serviss was one of the best-known popularizers of astronomy in the United States. Though trained in law, Serviss became a journalist in 1876 for the New York Sun and revealed an aptitude for reporting on scientific matters in clear terms that could be understood by the lay reader. This led to his first publication, Astronomy Through the Opera Glass, in 1888. A decade later he dipped his toes into writing fiction with the publication of Edison's Conquest of Mars, an unofficial sequel to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

It is doubtful that two more different a pair of books could be found than H.G. Wells' classic tale of alien invasion and Garrett P. Serviss sequel. Technically, Serviss' novel is a sequel to the downright copyright-infringing Americanization of Wells' novel that was published in Stateside newspapers as Fighters from Mars: the War of the Worlds in and near Boston. 

H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds was a smash success in England when serialized in Cosmopolitan. The Boston Post wanted to bring the story across the pond, but didn't particularly feel like paying Wells for the rights to do so. The result was Fighters from Mars, an abridgement that transplanted the events of Wells' story to the Eastern seaboard of the United States.

To compare, here is an excerpt from Wells' original:

Then came the night of the first falling-star. It was seen early in the morning rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame, high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling-star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth about one hundred miles east of him.

I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although my French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I loved in those days to look up at the night sky), I saw nothing of it. Yet this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only looked up as it passed. Some of those who saw its flight say it travelled with a hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many people in Berkshire, Surrey, and Middlesex must have seen the fall of it, and, at most, have thought that another meteorite had descended. No one seems to have troubled to look for the fallen mass that night.

But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting-star, and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand-pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction over the heath and heather, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn.

The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir-tree it had shivered to fragments in its descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked over, and its outline softened by a thick, scaly, dun-colored incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was, however, still so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near approach. A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed to the unequal cooling of its surface; for at that time it had not occurred to him that it might be hollow.

He remained standing at the edge of the pit that the Thing had made for itself, staring at its strange appearance, astonished chiefly at its unusual shape and color, and dimly perceiving even then some evidence of design in its arrival. The early morning was wonderfully still, and the sun, just clearing the pine-trees towards Weybridge, was already warm. He did not remember hearing any birds that morning, there was certainly no breeze stirring, and the only sounds were the faint movements from within the cindery cylinder. He was all alone on the common.

Then suddenly he noticed with a start that some of the gray clinker, the ashy incrustation that covered the meteorite, was falling off the circular edge of the end. It was dropping off in flakes and raining down upon the sand. A large piece suddenly came off and fell with a sharp noise that brought his heart into his mouth.

For a minute he scarcely realized what this meant, and, although the heat was excessive, he clambered down into the pit close to the bulk to see the Thing more clearly. He fancied even then that the cooling of the body might account for this, but what disturbed that idea was the fact that the ash was falling only from the end of the cylinder.

And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top of the cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement that he discovered it only through noticing that a black mark that had been near him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the circumference. Even then he scarcely understood what this indicated, until he heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk forward an inch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The cylinder was artificial—hollow—with an end that screwed out! Something within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!

"Good heavens!" said Ogilvy. "There's a man in it—men in it! Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!"

At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the Thing with the flash upon Mars.

The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to him that he forgot the heat, and went forward to the cylinder to help turn, But luckily the dull radiation arrested him before he could burn his hands on the still glowing metal. At that he stood irresolute for a moment, then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and set off running wildly into Woking. The time then must have been somewhere about six o'clock. He met a wagoner and tried to make him understand, but the tale he told, and his appearance, were so wild—his hat had fallen off in the pit—that the man simply drove on. He was equally unsuccessful with the potman who was just unlocking the doors of the public-house by Horsell Bridge. The, fellow thought he was a lunatic at large, and made an unsuccessful attempt to shut him into the tap-room. That sobered him a little, and when he saw Henderson, the London journalist, in his garden, he called over the palings and made himself understood.

"Henderson," he called, "you saw that shooting-star last night?"

"Well?" said Henderson.

"It's out on Horsell Common now."

"Good Lord!" said Henderson. "Fallen meteorite! That's good."

"But it's something more than a meteorite. It's a cylinder—an artificial cylinder, man! And there's something inside."

Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.

"What's that?" he said. He was deaf in one ear.

Ogilvy told him all that he had seen. Henderson was a minute or so taking it in. Then he dropped his spade, snatched up his jacket, and came out into the road. The two men hurried back at once to the common, and found the cylinder still lying in the same position. But now the sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air was either entering or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.

They listened, rapped on the scale with a stick, and, meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside must be insensible or dead.

Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They shouted consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again to get help. One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited and disordered, running up the little street in the bright sunlight, just as the shop folks were taking down their shutters and people were opening their bedroom windows. Henderson went into the railway station at once, in order to telegraph the news to London.

The newspaper articles had prepared men's minds for the reception of the idea.

By eight o'clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already started for the common to see the "dead men from Mars." That was the form the story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy, about a quarter to nine, when I went out to get my Daily Chronicle, I was naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and across the Ottershaw bridge to the sand-pits.

And the same from Fighters from Mars:

Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over northern Jersey eastward, a line of flame, high in the atmosphere.

Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star. Albin of Yale University described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds.

Dennings, our greatest American authority in meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about 90 or 100 miles. It seemed to him that it fell to the earth to the east.

Some of those who saw its flight say it travelled with a hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many persons in the towns and villages of Middlesex county must have seen the fall and have thought that another meteorite had descended. No one seems to have troubled to look for the fallen mass that night.

But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere in the fields above the Lexington road, rose early with the idea of finding it.

Find it he did soon after dawn, and not far from the Lexington line. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction.

They formed heaps visible a mile away. The long brown grass was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke arose against the dawn.

The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards.

It was, however, still so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near approach. He did not remember hearing any birds that morning, there was certainly no breeze stirring, and the only sounds were the faint movements from within the cindery cylinder. He was all alone.

Then suddenly he noticed with a start that some of the grey clinker was falling off the circular edge of the end. It was dropping off in flakes and raining down upon the sand.

A large piece suddenly came off and fell with a sharp noise that brought his heart into his mouth.

For a minute he scarcely realized what this meant, until he heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk forward an inch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash.

The cylinder was artificial--hollow--with an end that screwed out! Something within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!

"Good heavens!" said Ogilvy. "There's a man in it--men in it! Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!" At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the thing with the flash upon Mars.

The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to him that he forgot the heat and went forward to the cylinder to help turn. But luckily the dull radiation arrested him before he could burn his hands on the still-glowing metal.

He stood irresolute for a moment, then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and set off running wildly toward Concord. The time then must have been somewhere about six o'clock.

He met a wagon driver and tried to make him understand, but the tale he told and his appearance were so wild--his hat had fallen off in the pit--that the man simply drove on. He was equally unsuccessful with the porter who was just unlocking the doors of the road house.

The fellow thought he was a lunatic at large and made an unsuccessful attempt to shut him into the stable. That sobered him a little; and when he saw Henderson, the journalist, in his garden, he called over the palings and made himself understood.

"Henderson," he called, "you saw that shooting star last night?"

"Well?" said Henderson.

"It's out on the sand pits now."

"Good Lord!" said Henderson. "Fallen meteorite! That's good."

"But it's something more than a meteorite. It's a cylinder--an artificial cylinder, man! And there's something inside."

Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand. "What's that?" he said. He was deaf in one ear.

Ogilvy told him all that he had seen. Henderson was a minute or so taking it in. Then he dropped his spade, snatched at his coat, and came out into the road.

The two men hurried back at once to the sand pits, and found the cylinder still lying in the same position. But now the sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air was either entering or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.

They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and, meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside must be insensible or dead. Of course they were quite unable to do anything. They shouted consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again to get help.

By eight o'clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already started to see the "dead men from Mars." That was the form the story took. I heard of it first from my newsboy about a quarter to nine. I was naturally startled, and lost no time in going out to the sand pits.

Officially, Fighters from Mars is an anonymous work, but suspicion falls on Garrett P. Serviss since he went on to pen the sequel the same year. And though Edison's Conquest of Mars is intended as a sequel to Fighters from Mars, it is actually better to read it in contrast to the British original. In doing so, the cultural differences permeating each side of the Atlantic at the dawn of the Twentieth Century come more clearly into focus.   

The War of the Worlds is very much the story of Imperial decline and cosmic nihilism. Wells turns the tables on the British Empire by bringing down an invasion force that does to it as Britannia has done to so many others around the world. How many spears and muskets were but pinpricks against the undefeatable might of the English armada? A superior force from beyond our furthest frontier annihilates the seat of the Empire itself, literally sucking the lifeblood from its citizens. Those citizens are themselves anonymous spectators. The narrator has been denied a name and identity. That is the point: he was just another faceless Imperial functionary before the invasion and just another faceless victim during it. Only a bizarre twist of evolutionary fate rescues a subjugated Earth, but it is psychologically conquered. Our narrator has still lost himself in contemplations of a universe cruelly indifferent to humanity.

Then there is Edison's Conquest of Mars. The title alone betrays so much about it, for this is not merely a war between planets. This is the conquest of the alien orb by the soldiers of Earth, and it is led, by name, by Thomas Edison. The anonymity imparted by Wells is utterly overturned by Serviss, who was himself an already notable scientific author and lecturer. Everybody who's anybody is involved in launching this invasion spearheaded by Edison. Just as Napoleon brought along a cadre of researchers and artists in his invasion of Egypt, so does Edison bring along the best and brightest of the turn-of-the-century: Kelvin, Roentgen, Rayleigh, Mossiman, Hale, and more. Contrary to the nihilistic egalitarianism of Wells, Serviss has all of the significant heads of state survive the initial onslaught, from Queen Victoria to Kaiser Wilhelm to Emperor Meiji to the King of Siam, whose donation of a massive diamond assists the subscription service required to raise an army of vessels designed by Edison.

Of course, this great counter-invasion force is led by the Americans. Wells wrote of the decline of the British Empire and Serviss writes of the ascent of the American one. This aspiring world power lacks for neither money nor enthusiasm, and Serviss spares no shame for informing us of how grateful the world is to be led by them in this endeavour. With the exception of Wilhelm, however, who Serviss has no small pleasure in picking on. As these royal heads meet in Washington to hash over the invasion, Wilhelm finds democracy unflattering and insists on returning home to lands that know proper respect for a king. Such unruly citizens are practically falling over themselves to enlist for the counter-invasion force.

Efforts like flying to Mars and attacking the invincible Martians would be impossible if not for Edison's technological breakthroughs. Two are most critical for the progress of the story, the first being the development of craft that can cruise between the planets on a principle of electric repulsion. The second is a disintegration beam, the effect of which is achieved by disrupting the harmonic convergence of atoms. Humanity is not waiting around for microbes this time. 

Besides imperial American jingosim, the tone of Edison's Conquest of Mars is quite different from Wells. Given Serviss' scientific credentials, having published the popular guide Astronomy Through an Opera Glass a decade before, his story is much more of a Scientific Romance in the vein of Jules Verne and Camille Flammarion. En route to Mars, the savants pause on the Moon to explore its environs, discovering traces of an ancient cyclopean civilization and diamond-encrusted craters. Before reaching Mars, they have their first engagement with Martian asteroid miners excavating gold from an orbiting body. As much time is given to the study of gravity as to the effects of disintegration rays on Martian physiology.

In contradiction to Wells, who was always light on actual science to begin with, Serviss' universe is not only comprehensible to humanity, but conquerable by it through the marriage of scientific knowledge and financial capital flowering in the United States. This emphasis on "Capitalism's Conquest of Nature" actually distances Edison's Conquest of Mars from the likes of Verne and Flammarion, implanting it more thoroughly in the American literary zeitgeist shared with John Jacob Astor IV's A Journey in Other Worlds and Edward S. Ellis' The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies. Inspired by this very novel, John Clute coined the term "Edisonade" for this variation on the Scientific Romance (defined as "any story dating from the late nineteenth century onward and featuring a young US male inventor hero who ingeniously extricates himself from tight spots and who, by so doing, saves himself from defeat and corruption, and his friends and nation from foreign oppressors.").

Beyond this, some critics suggest that Serviss had been long holding onto this story and that War of the Worlds only provided an occasion for it. A solid clue is that the Martians of the piece in no way resemble the Lovecraftian extraterrestrial menace of Wells. Such alien entities stand as embodiments of malevolent nature, and I doubt that there is any accident in Cthulhu being tentacled. Serviss' Martians are giant, bestial men, a breed of "intelligent savage" who in the end are conquerable by humanity not only in military prowess, but in culture and spirit.

In itself proof of the transition in global power at the end of the 19th century, Edison's Conquest of Mars must have captured the American zeitgeist sufficiently to warrant a new side-career for Serviss. Though never matching the output of a Verne or Wells, he nevertheless did produce a new story every few years, from 1900's The Moon Metal to 1909's A Columbus of Space to 1911's The Second Deluge and his final novel, 1915's The Moon Maiden. This, paired with his almost yearly output of popular scientific books, make him one of the last of the true, grand old Victorian Scientific Romantics in marked contrast with the man whose work he cribbed in Edison's Conquest of Mars. The arc of Wells' career was from metaphoric Scientific Romances through which he voiced his social critiques, to true Science Fiction prescribing how technology may be used to achieve his faux-utopian ends, to plain political tracts. 

The Moon Metal begins with a simple and practical premise: the discovery of gold reserves at the South Pole which throws off the gold standard and creates economic chaos throughout the world. Suitable replacements are discussed with little resolution, and one would be excused for thinking that Serviss saw this as his chance to offer up his opinion on global monetary systems. Into this mess arrives Dr. Max Syx, bearing with him a brand new metal of previously unknown type. He has dubbed this metal "artemisium" and offers it as a substitute for the gold standard. And how will he maintain the appropriate and necessary amounts of artemisium available to the world's governments? Why, by his own proprietary knowledge of how to extract it.

Dr. Syx has little fear for the security of his monopoly. He even invites bankers, investors and other scientists out to his mine in the Grand Teton Mountains to investigate the ore for themselves. To the untrained eye, Syx insists, natural artemisium looks virtually identical to ordinary chrysolite, and the process for its extraction is so deceptively simply that it defies the brilliance of anyone but him to discover it. Prospectors flood to the Tetons to try their hand and find a great deal of the ore, quite easily... too easily... but are none the wiser for how to turn it into the precious metal.

This piques the curiousity of a group of investigators, who deduce that it must be Syx himself who is seeding the mountains with an ore that not only seems like chrysolite but is chrysolite. This sets off a scientific mystery story as they try to figure out what Syx is up to and uncover the nature of this miraculous substance which only he can produce. Evidently they did not read the title of the story they are in.

Serviss is at his best in this story. With the cosmos at his fingertips he seems only to produce something banal. When forced to restrain himself to a scientific mystery, and only in so many pages, he fashions a real little gem. The investigators' snooping around is enjoyable and there's some fun nonsense science in it to explain the eponymous element. Most curiously, we see in The Moon Metal an early prognostication of our still-ambitious proposal to mine the celestial bodies for resources that may prove useful (and profitable) here on earth.

Another decade passed - during which he mostly wrote scientific books - before he wrote another Scientific Romance. This was A Columbus of Space, which began with a lofty dedication "To the readers of Jules Verne's romances..." Thankfully he had the presence of mind to clarify  "Not because the author flatters himself that he can walk in the Footsteps of that Immortal Dreamer, but because, like Jules Verne, he believes that the World of Imagination is as legitimate a Domain of the Human Mind as the World of Fact." He was right not to flatter himself so.

A Columbus of Space is the nadir of Serviss' Edisonades, who wrote the most Edisonadish of the Edisonades... The pulpiest, purplest, most petrified stories of the type. Their lionization of specifically American individualism, industry, invention, and colonialism - Disneyland's Main Street U.S.A. in space - can be entertaining enough in the right hands. Certainly no implicitly worse than comparable stories of British or French exploration. Unfortunately, Serviss' hands are not the right ones. A Columbus of Space means to describe scientific heroism, and instead describes what I can only call a kind of maleficent pranksterism.

The science-hero of the book is Edmund Stonewall, a quiet and dreamy-eyed inventor whose associates never cease to praise his unfailing, unflappable, imperturbable intelligence. It begins with the very first sentence of A Columbus of Space, and is loathe to diminish in intensity:

I am a hero worshiper; an insatiable devourer of biographies; and I say that no man in all the splendid list ever equaled Edmund Stonewall. You smile because you have never heard his name, for, until now, his biography has not been written. And this is not truly a biography; it is only the story of the crowning event in Stonewall's career.

The effect Serviss was going for is severely diminished by the fact that neither Edmund nor his companions have the slightest clue what they're doing as they traipse around the planet Venus aboard his atomic-powered airship. Most of their choices seem to be made simply for puerile interest, like strapping a gang of the gorilla-like inhabitants of Venus' dark side to a carriage on the underside of their ship, only to have them die in a reckless charge on the stormy winds of the great ice mountains separating the hemispheres. The activities of this latter day "Columbus" during their and a half on Earth's sister sphere are reckless at best, and just as frequently senseless and violent.

Anything, taken too seriously, may be reduced to a kind of self-parody. A Columbus of Space nearly reads as a satire, and would have been a pretty funny one if it were. Yet there is such an earnestness in Serviss' delivery that the reader must inescapably conclude that he kind of means it. Edmund with his floolhardy choices and bipolar regret after those choices kill off one or two or a dozen people really does come across like Serviss' ideal man. Is it a flaw in Serviss' own character, or merely a want of literary ability? 

For Fame, Money, or Love? by Rodrigues Ottolengui

There are certain mysteries that man is not meant to know, foremost of which are the inner workings of a woman's mind. And what if, having learned its terrible secrets, a man could invent some device by which to express his anguish in its purest form before taking his own life in the sorrowful revelation? That is the subject of the short story For Fame, Money, or Love? by dentist and author Rodrigues Ottolengui  (1861-1937), as it appeared in the May 1896 volume of The Black Cat Magazine.

Professor Ezekiel Harkinson's Plan

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

- George Orwell

Alas for the best-laid plans of our brightest intellectuals that they should always suffer defeat at the hands of the ignorant. How far humanity might progress if we were not held back by pithy emotional considerations like people marrying who they want to marry!

Enter Professor Ezekiel Harkinson, who has lit upon a general plan for the betterment of humanity. Namely, eugenics. Charles Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton coined the term itself, and became a proponent of the modern, "scientific" eugenics that became a cause célèbre of 19th century progressives. It might seem a strange, even morbid, compulsion to associate doctrines of selective breeding, genetic screening, forced sterilizations, forced abortions, marriage restrictions, miscegenation laws, and ultimately genocide with progressivism, yet it make sense when considering that the dominating feature of progressive thought and politics is the belief that humanity is morally perfectible through external authoritarian control. With enough restrictions, humanity may achieve a state of grace, justice, equality, security, or whatever the goal may be. So academia, politicians, media, suffragettes, temperance activists, progressive churches, and any thinking intellectual of good conscience saw the potential to eliminate poverty and violence through the breeding out of human "degeneracy." Organizations like the American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League (now Planned Parenthood) advocated for and implemented the ideas. The result was state-run forced sterilization programs for physical, mental, and moral "defectives" across the Westernized nations, culminating in the Holocaust. It was largely conservatives who opposed eugenics, like G.K. Chesterton with his 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils and Pope Pius XI's encyclical Casti connubii.    

Lieutenant Henry H. Barkoll, US Navy, offers a more lighthearted and farcical critique of eugenics' shortcomings in his short story Professor Ezekiel Harkinson's Plan. It appears here as it did originally in  the March 1891 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.

The Ghost-Extinguisher by Gelett Burgess

The following tale of ghost-extinguishing may seem somewhat familiar. It appears that Gelett Burgess figured out the business of removing unwanted spectres long before Mickey Mouse or Dan Akroyd. 

The Ghost-Extinguisher appears here as it did in the April, 1905 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine.

Master of the Octopus by Edward Olin Weeks

The inventive genius of the 19th century must, of course, contend with the rapacious interests of 19th century robber-barons. In The Master of the Octopus, published in the October 1899 Pearson's Magazine,  Edward Olin Weeks describes the tragic encounter between the two over a perpetual light machine. Click on the pages for a larger version.

Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine by E.J. Rath

Pity the frustrated inventor, who has a remarkable idea that must be shaped to sheer dumb fact. Such is Mr. Penney, latest in the line of Darius Green and other hayseed inventors. Formerly of the city, forced to the countryside for his health, Mr. Penney cannot acclimatize to the condition of being a farmer. His workshop lures him ever onward to misadventure, undaunted by his numerous setbacks.

Written by E.J. Rath, pseudonym of Edith Rathbone Jacobs Brainerd, Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine appears here as it originally did in the August 1908 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Brainerd was a well-established author, many of whose stories had been adapted to film. Tragically, she died at the age of 37 when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington D.C. collapsed under heavy snow on January 27, 1922. The incident also claimed the life her husband Chauncey and 200 others. Illustrations for Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine are by Horace Taylor. Click on each image for a larger version. 

A Tale of Negative Gravity

A Tale of Negative Gravity was written by Frank R. Stockton and debuted in the November 1884 edition of The Century magazine. In it, an inventor cracks the problem of anti-gravity, much to his wife's chagrin. Conspiring to keep it a secret for personal use, it ends becoming quite handy in settling a matter of the heart for the inventor's son. It is presented here as originally published. Click on each page for a larger version.

The Diamond Maker of Sacramento by Noah Brooks

Published in the July 1868 edition The Overland Monthly, volume 1 and issue 1, The Diamond Maker of Sacramento by Noah Brooks defies the convention one might expect of a California Scientific Romance. Namely, it's not about the Gold Rush of '49. Whereas earlier Scientific Romances like Aurifodina: Or, Adventures in the Gold Region (1849, available in Science Fiction of Antebellum America; An Anthology) were transparently based on the gold rush, it serves more as a conceptual backdrop for The Diamond Maker of Sacramento. It's roll is to demonstrate the atmosphere of lawless ambition on America's westernmost frontier, and the ready availability of capital by which the mad scientist can indulge his foolhardy experiments. Yet even the mad scientist learns that there are limitations on even the most liberal frontiers, including the most ultimate limitation.

The following is The Diamond Maker of Sacramento as it appeared in vol. 1, issue 1, of The Overland Monthly. Click for a larger image. 

Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Due in no small part to the Disney film adaptation, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has emerged as the pre-eminent classic of Victorian Scientific Romances. Verne alone published 54 Scientific Romances during his lifetime, bearing the brand label "Voyages Extraordinaires." The term was invented by Verne's publisher, Jules Hetzel, to describe a brand new genre of literature designed "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format...the history of the universe." Twenty Thousand Leagues is, arguably, the greatest of them all.

Illustration of Captain Nemo based on Jules Verne,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

As some critics have observed, based primarily on shoddy English translations, Twenty Thousand Leagues is for the most part a novel about fish. Though an inventive extrapolation on existing submersible technology, the Nautilus is for the most part a plot device by which Verne takes his readers on an unparalleled oceanographic expedition through each of the seven seas. Over its 200-some pages, Captain Nemo is a tourguide through oceans, beneath icecaps, past famous shipwrecks, and beyond Atlantis. But Verne was also an insightful critic of society as well as a literary inventor of technological contraptions. There is more to Twenty Thousand Leagues than fish, or submarines.

Peering out of the salon window,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

Film versions have tended towards the character drama of the Nautilus' captives - French Professor Aronnax, his assistant Conseil and French-Canadian harpooner Ned Land - though their attempts to escape their maritime prison were a minimal aspect of the novel. Twenty Thousand Leagues is not really about them. Rather, they are the lens through which we are invited to, first, see the world beneath the ocean surface and, second, to see into the life of the mysterious Captain Nemo.

The fiery fate of Atlantis, by Alphonse de Neuville.

Though much has been made of Disney's Nemo as the tortured political refugee seeking revenge against and refuge from the rulers of the surface world, this cinematic version is actually the crudest caricature of Verne's mariner. While he has the airs of waging war on war - and it might prompt a post-9/11 society to ask if you can wage wars on tactics like war and terrorism - his is really a much simpler story of revenge. Verne's character is more complicated and politically charged, to the point that the published version was actually censored from the original manuscript. The author's intention was to make Nemo a Polish refugee escaped from tsarist Russia, but Hetzel felt it would alienate the Russian audience. Eventually, in the sequel novel The Mysterious Island, Nemo was revealed as an Indian prince escaped from British India.

Preparing for battle, by Alphonse de Neuville.

Verne is still more ambiguous about Nemo than even simple anti-colonial interpretations permit. Nemo reflects one of the fundamental anxieties of post-colonial Western society, which wishes to redress the endless ream of crimes that made possible its existence and economic prosperity while simultaneously refusing to leave that advantage behind. On the one hand he is the avenger of the poor and oppressed, but on the other he is a colonialist par excellence.

Though professing a desire to escape the world above, he does so only in terms that allow him to take the fruits of that land with him. He fishes the sea for food, but trawls the land for treasures of books, paintings and other things that occupy his salon and library. His library, Aronnax estimates, contains some six or seven thousand volumes, which Nemo corrects at 12,000 with the addendum "These are the only ties which bind me to the earth." Not quite, as amongst the artistic treasures in Nemo's salon are,

...a Madonna of Raphael, a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph of Correggio, a woman of Titian, and Adoration of Veronese, an Assumption of Murillo, a portrait of Holbein, a monk of Velasquez, a martyr of Ribeira, a fair of Rubens, two Flemish landscapes of Teniers, three little "genre" pictures of Gérard Dow, Metsu, and Paul Potter, two specimens of Géricault and Prudhon, and some sea-pieces of Backhuysen and Vernet... Delacroix, Ingres, Decamp, Troyon, Meissonnier, Daubigny...

Add to this the composers whose works rest upon the organ - Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hérold, Wagner, Auber, Gounod - and what we have is a cultured man of means possessing refined tastes. Feebly he objects that these "Masters have no age" and that "in the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced," invoking the timeless objective value of artistic excellence against the direct social, cultural, economic and chronological processes that permit artistic excellence.

The salon, by Édouard Riou.

The Nautilus which houses such treasures is not the unique product of a lone inventor's sweat and elbow-grease, but is itself very much the product of colonial industry. Nemo reveals his process:

Each separate portion... was brought from different parts of the globe. The keel was forged at Crensot, the shaft of the screw at Penn & Co.'s, London, the iron plates of the hull at Laird's of Liverpool, the screw itself at Scott's at Glasgow. The reservoirs were made by Cail & Co. at Paris, the engine by Krupp in Prussia, its beak in Motala's workshop in Sweden, its mathematical instruments by Hart Brothers, of New York, etc...

The most physical labour was in the jigsaw piecing together of the craft on a desert island. The final tally of Nemo's privileged escape from the terrors of the surface world? "It came therefore to £67,000, and £80,000 more for fitting it up, and about £200,000 with the works of art and the collections it contains." Keep in mind that he is speaking here of the investment capital, prior to having been able to access the riches of the ocean depths. In his life on land, Nemo was obviously a man of considerable wealth and education by anyone's standard. "Immensely rich, sir;" he tells Aronnax, "and I could, without missing it, pay the national debt of France."

The Nautilus, by Alphonse de Neuville.

The land is still required for the operation of the Nautilus' engines. Unlike the Disney film, which ties the electrical power of the ship to atomic power, Verne's device was a sodium extraction method that requires coal in the production of the sodium. The coal, Nemo proudly states, comes from beds beneath the ocean. The burning of the coal for the sodium needs must occur on land, in the shelter provided by the exhausted crater of an extinct volcano in the Atlantic.

Nowhere are Nemo's ties to the land more obvious than when he literally plants his flag and his name over a whole continent. Later on in the novel, without any hint of the irony or hypocrisy, Nemo plants the black flag embroidered with a golden "N" on the snow and gravel of Antarctica and proclaims,

I, Captain Nemo, on this 21st day of March, 1868, have reached the south pole on the ninetieth degree; and I take possession of this part of the globe, equal to one sixth of the known continents.

When asked by Aronnax in whose name he lays this claim, Nemo brusquely replies "In my own, sir!" Finally as the sun slips out of sight on its half-year retreat, he bids it farewell:

Adieu, sun! Disappear, thou radiant orb! Rest beneath this open sea, and let a night of six months spread its shadows over my new domains!

Gone are any pretences of escaping the land or its systems of colonialism and domination. Nemo becomes the sole monarch of the Antarctic, and happily so.

Nemo surveys his new empire, by Alphonse de Neuville.

But for the most part, Nemo's chosen domain of colonial exploitation is the ocean, which serves as his personal political territory, larder and bank. On the one hand he speaks of the liberty of the depths, but on the other hand speaks of his ownership of them:

... the sea supplies all my wants. Sometimes I cast my nets in tow, and I draw them in ready to break. Sometimes I hunt in the midst of this element, which appears to be inaccessible to man, and quarry the game which dwells in my submarine forests. My flocks, like those of Neptune's old shepherds, graze fearlessly in the immense prairies of the ocean. I have a vast property there, which I cultivate myself, and which is always sown by the hand of the Creator of all things.

A hunting excursion, by Alphonse de Neuville.

The society he creates aboard his ship, which makes for the efficient exploitation of the fruits de mer, is a definite mirror of the hierarchies above the waves. The library and salon are Nemo's alone, granted to the three captives, but with no indication that they are at the service of the Nautilus' mostly silent crew. This crew is a nameless presence that exists to serve the needs of the protagonists. Like the Disney film, this has a practical narrative purpose of not bogging the story down with additional characters, with the unfortunate side-effect of creating a deeply classist society aboard the ship. A later Verne film - Master of the World starring Vincent Price and written by Richard Matheson - does give personality to the crew, to much better effect in explaining their loyalty to the mission and their captain.

Repeatedly Nemo demonstrates compassion for the oppressed and impoverished. He reveals his ethnicity only briefly by identifying with an East Indian pearl diver he rescues from the clutches of a shark attack (likely because this is as close as Verne got to figuring out who Nemo was going to be by publication time, if he could not be Polish). He is again shown sending gold ingots up to another fisherman, as well as demonstrating the source of this wealth. Upon seeing the shipwrecks that supply Nemo with his millions in net worth, Aronnax remarks that he pities "the thousands of unfortunates to whom so much riches well distributed would have been profitable, whilst for them they will be forever barren." Nemo angrily retorts,

Do you think then, sir, that these riches are lost because I gather them? Is it for myself alone, according to your idea, that I take the trouble to collect these treasures? Who told you that I did not make a good use of it? Do you think I am ignorant that there are suffering beings and oppressed races on this earth, miserable creatures to console, victims to avenge? Do you not understand?

Saving the pearl diver, by Édouard Riou.

He hands charity to these suffering masses, and certainly claims solidarity, but the question must be raised as to the exact extent of the solidarity. What does this solidarity even mean when one has fled from the life conditions of the suffering into a perpetual escape of relative ease and luxury? Nemo's life is not one of real involvement in the struggle of others as one among them, or attempting to use a position of wealth and authority to affect systemic change to benefit the poor. As Aronnax observes, "I understand the life of this man; he has made a world apart for himself, in which he treasures all his greatest wonders."

Nemo is very much the embodiment of the modern, or post-modern, age. It is acutely aware of the processes of colonial exploitation of people and the environment, but at the same time still insistent on benefiting from those processes. It dispenses charity in the name of solidarity while setting a world apart for itself (which, granted, is still better than doing nothing or, even worse, claiming solidarity while doing nothing). In the end, Nemo is prohibited from reconciling this ambiguity to himself, as the symbolic Maelstrom sends a crazed spectre of himself and his ship to the bottom of the seas, from whence it will emerge in The Mysterious Island.

Aronnax and co. escape during the Maelstrom,
by Alphonse de Neuville.