SF Luminaries: Frank Herbert

Denis Villeneuve, dir.: Dune: Part One (2021)

Dunes

"These memories, which are my life"
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

I see that my old paperback copy of Dune is dated 1973. I think that I must have got it for my birthday in 1975, when I was just turning 13. It didn't disappoint. In fact, I think that next to The Lord of the Rings, it probably had the biggest influence on me of anything I'd read up to then.

Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)

Not that I found it flawless, even at the time. I found the italicised internal monologues by the main characters unnecessarily intrusive on the action, and I also found tedious the 'sayings' by each of these characters enshrined in quote marks at the opening of each chapter.

But, hey, those were small things beside the sheer fascination of Herbert's vision of planetary ecologies, his portrayal of the Fremen, and the tantalising glimpses he provided of an immensely complex galaxy-wide economy.

Frank Herbert: Dune Messiah (1969)

Dune Messiah was an unexpectedly depressing cold shower-bath of a sequel to the lush vistas of Dune - though it's definitely grown on me over the years - but Frank Herbert seemed to be back on planet-spanning form in its follow-up, Children of Dune.

Frank Herbert: Children of Dune (1976)

I dutifully followed the saga through all its twists and turns in the next three sequels, until the ridiculously titled (though actually rather good) Chapter House Dune in 1985. Herbert died the year after it was published.

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David Lynch, dir.: Dune (1984)

Dune, dir. & writ. David Lynch (based on the novel by Frank Herbert) - with Francesca Annis, Linda Hunt, Kyle MacLachlan, Everett McGill, Kenneth McMillan, Siân Phillips, Jürgen Prochnow, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Max von Sydow, Sean Young - (USA, 1984).

By then, however, we'd entered the world of the movies. There were many rumours about the first Dune film before it came out. I think Sci-fi fans in general were most excited by the prospect of a Ridley Scott version, building on the artistry of his Alien and (in particular) Blade Runner triumphs.

I don't think anyone - or anyone in my circle, at any rate - knew about the Jodorowsky concept designs, or any of the other details of the rocky road that led to David Lynch's eventual De Laurentis-produced spectacular.

I wouldn't say that it was love at first sight. The movie was too campy and over-the-top for an SF-cinematic sensibility formed by Kubrick's 2001 and Scott's Blade Runner. Over time, however, I began to see that Lynch was a horse of a different colour. He saw Dune as a huge Italian melodrama, with a lush operatic score, and a massive cast of picturesque characters.

Francesca Annis as Lady Jessica and Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides (1984)

The wonderful visual inventiveness of his guild navigators and planet-dwarfing space-ships remains impressive. And, once I had learned to recalibrate my expectations, I found his relish for teaasingly gnomic lines ("A beginning is a very delicate time" - Princess Irulan; "We have worm-sign such as God has never seen" - Stilgar; "The sleeper must awaken" - Duke Leto; "Tell me of your homeworld, Usul" - Chani; "The Spice must flow!" - passim) a source of rich entertainment at each of many reviewings over the years.

Sean Young as Chani with Paul Muad'Dib (1984)

Francesca Annis was a spectacularly beautiful Lady Jessica, Sean Young played Chani as a kind of slinky cat-woman, and Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck looked super-cool, as always. Kyle MacLachlan - well, what can you say? He seemed to be in training for Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks already, but then one doesn't go to Grand Opera for gritty realism.

John Harrison, dir.: Frank Herbert's Dune: TV Miniseries (2000)

Frank Herbert’s Dune, dir. & writ. John Harrison (based on the novel by Frank Herbert) – with William Hurt, Alec Newman, Saskia Reeves, Susan Sarandon, Daniela Amavia – (USA, 2000)

There were, of course, omissions. Putting so large a plot into one movie required some fairly violent surgery, but these were interestingly reexamined in John Harrison's 3-part miniseries, some fifteen years later.

Alec Newman made a far more plausible Paul than MacLachlan had. He looked streetwise and desert-hardened from the very beginning, and only Saskia Reeves seemed to have blundered in from some BBC kitchen sink drama by mistake. The fact that it was largely filmed in the Czech Republic also guaranteed some strikingly imaginative costume and set designs. All in all, it was a thoroughly creditable effort, which complemented rather than superseding Lynch's pioneering film.

John Harrison, dir.: Frank Herbert's Children of Dune: TV Miniseries (2003)

Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune, dir. & writ. John Harrison (based on the novels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune by Frank Herbert)– with James McAvoy, Alec Newman, Alice Krige, Susan Sarandon – (USA, 2003)

It was in the sequel that John Harrison's vision really started to pay off, though. The addition of Herbert's two sequels to the original Dune plotline helped greatly in fleshing out the true richness of the Dune universe. James McAvoy made a great Duke Leto, Paul Muad'Dib's son and heir - the future God Emperor of Dune of the fourth novel - and the complex intrigues and machinations surrounding the new Fremen imperium were spectacularly embodied on screen.

Alice Krige made a far better Lady Jessica than Saskia Reeves ever had, and most of the other casting decisions were similarly shrewd.

Denis Villeneuve, dir.: Dune: Part One (2021)

Dune: Part One, dir. Denis Villeneuve, writ. Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, & Eric Roth (based on the novel by Frank Herbert) – with Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, Javier Bardem – (USA, 2021)

All of which brings us, I guess, to the $64,000 question: what do you think of Denis Villeneuve's new film? I should begin by saying that for a Dune-ophile such as myself, any new movie based on Herbert's work is big news.

Denis Villeneuve, dir. Arrival (2016)

Having said that, I guess that I have to make a couple of provisos. First of all, I do find some of the adulation heaped on Villeneuve's sci-fi movies to date a bit misplaced. Arrival was, I thought, very good - mainly because of the ingenious plot of Ted Chiang's original short story.

I did my level best to like Blade Runner 2049, and - once again - found some points of interest in its approach to the tried-and-true android theme, but already a certain visual blankness seemed to be standing in for the seedy baroque magnificence of Ridley Scott's imagination.

Denis Villeneuve, dir. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Dune, too, looked frustratingly blank to me. The city of Arrakeen looked like an old concrete gun emplacement beefed up with a bit of CGI. The spaceships were larger and emptier than David Lynch's, but otherwise they lacked distinction - or any particular role beyond spectacle. Any cinema-goer these days has seen a few too many such space-scapes already.

What, then, of the performances? Some pretty impressive actors had been recruited to fill these oh-so-familiar roles, but they had - in almost every case - little to work with in the minimalist script. For all the richness of the plot material to get through in the first half of Herbert's book, this Dune (Part One) (as it's coyly labelled) seems to devote an inordinate amount of time to its characters' apparent desire to stare out to sea, or into space, or into the desert, without much to say.

It's not that I don't concede that internal monologues were somewhat overused as a device by Lynch, but that was a true reflection of Frank Herbert's own practice, and without them there's seldom enough in the dialogue to explain what's going on.

Who, then, stands out? Not, I'm afraid, Timothée Chalamet, who does a good enough job of playing the callow, young heir of a noble house, but shows few signs of his coming metamorphosis into Paul Muad'Dib, Messiah of Arrakis and Galactic Kwisatz Haderach. His puzzlement at the welcome he receives on arrival at the desert planet Arrrakis is, I fear, echoed by much of the cinema audience. There's just not a lot to him - at this point, at any rate.

Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica

Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica? Wonderful, I'm glad to say. It's true that I was already a bit of a fan, but she is, to me, the only actor on screen who seems actually to be there, on a strange, forbidding planet, caught in the toils of her Bene Gesserit sisterhood's plans.

Oscar Isaac - meh; Josh Brolin - God knows what movie he thought he was in; Stellan Skarsgård - a very disappointing Baron Harkonnen: a Halloween mask could have performed with more distinction; Dave Bautista - another massively talented comic actor, reduced to playing a thuggish sidekick; Zendaya - reduced mainly to wandering around in dream sequences; Chang Chen - when one thinks of what the late lamented Dean Stockwell made of his Doctor Yueh, this one seems pretty close to nothing; Sharon Duncan-Brewster - actually this seemed rather a nice notion: Max von Sydow (needless to say) was great in the role of Doctor Liet-Kynes, the imperial planetary ecologist, in the 1984 movie, but changing the character's gender and ethnicity made her far more believable, as well as the fact that she seemed more interested than most of the other in doing some actual acting; Charlotte Rampling - if you insist on hiding one of the best-known faces in cinema behind a rope net, little can be expected, and little was accordingly achieved: both of the previous cinematic Reverend Mothers were far superior; Jason Momoa - another interesting casting idea, but his obvious desire to be doing something all the time made him seem a bit out of step with the passivity of the production as a whole; and (last and unfortunately least) Javier Bardem - a dreadfully ill-judged casting decision; was he worse than the equally out-of-place Everett McGill's Stilgar in the original movie? He was certainly no better, that's for sure.

Cast Members of Dune

A lot of the problems here come down to a single factor. Denis Villeneuve seems entirely to lack a sense of humour. In the case of very intense, confined dramas, this can lead to highly effective results: in his early film Incendies (2010), for instance, or even his first Hollywood film Prisoners (2013).

But when the action portrayed is a bit over-the-top (which is a good description of Herbert's work in general), he seems to lack the tonal sense of how to shift registers, make it somehow less unbelievable with a well-timed joke or the adoption of a slightly less ponderous approach to things. Hence the strange trainwreck that was the film Sicario: a lot of nonsense about a very serious subject - a theme treated far more adroitly in Breaking Bad. Hence, too, the nasty and irrelevant psychopath subplot in his Blade Runner sequel: a tiresome intrusion on a film whose legitimate interests lay elsewhere.

Jared Leto in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

To do the director credit, there's no character in Dune as irritating as Jared Leto in Blade Runner 2049, but Villeneuve still doesn't seem to understand that if you take out virtually all the background trimmings and subtleties from Frank Herbert's universe, you're left not with austerity but boredom. Cracking a joke or two, always David Lynch's first instinct to relieve the tension, seems to be quite off the agenda. There's not even any room in all these hours of cinema for a character so gleefully anarchic as Julie Cox's Princess Irulan in the John Harrison version.

Julie Cox in Frank Herbert's Dune (2000)

Vague disappointment - that, I'm afraid, was the emotion I was left with. There was indeed much there on screen to enjoy (I particularly liked the dragonfly-like thopters).

Shai-Hulud (2021)

As I said before, any Dune movie is cause for celebration among the faithful (the ones who intone "the Spice must flow" at regular intervals, and make a peculiar hand gesture at each appearance of the great sandworm, Shai-Hulud: "May His passage cleanse the world"). But Denis Villeneuve is no Ridley Scott, and there's little point in having such inflated expectations of him.

Shai-Hulud (2000)

Naturally I'll be trotting off to see Part Two when it's released - if only to admire the Garbo-esque Rebecca Ferguson once again - and (who knows?) maybe this time Villeneuve'll pull out the stops a bit further. He's promised as much, after all.

Shai-Hulud (1984)

But don't go dissing David Lynch in my presence anytime soon. A myth has grown up that his 1984 Dune movie was a disaster when it was, in fact, an eccentric masterpiece, one which gave fair warning of many transgressive cinematic excesses to come!

Floyd Snyder: The Dunes (2015)

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Frank Herbert (1984)

Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. [Frank Herbert]
(1920-1986)

The Dune Series:


1. Dune. [Part I, "Dune World": Analog (Dec 1963 – Feb 1964); Parts II and III, "The Prophet of Dune": Analog (Jan – May 1965)]. 1965. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1973.
2. Dune Messiah. 1969. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1973.
3. Children of Dune. 1976. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1977.
4. God Emperor of Dune. 1981. London: New English Library, 1982.
5. Heretics of Dune. 1984. London: New English Library, 1985.
6. Chapter House Dune. 1985. London: New English Library, 1986.

The Pandora Sequence [aka the WorShip series]:


7. Destination: Void. 1966. Rev. ed. 1978. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
8. [with Bill Ransom]: The Jesus Incident. 1979. An Orbit Book. London: Futura Publications Limited, 1980.
9. [with Bill Ransom]: The Lazarus Effect. 1983. An Orbit Book. London: Futura Publications Limited, 1984.
10. [with Bill Ransom]: The Ascension Factor. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1988.

The ConSentiency Series:


11. Whipping Star. 1970. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1978.
12. The Dosadi Experiment. 1977. A Futura Book. London: Futura Publications Limited, 1979.

Other Novels:


13. The Dragon in the Sea. 1956. [aka 'Under Pressure' and '21st Century Sub']. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
14. The Green Brain. 1966. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1979.
15. The Eyes of Heisenberg. 1966. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1976.
16. The Heaven Makers. 1968. London: New English Library, 1982.
17. The Santaroga Barrier. New York: Berkeley, 1968.
18. Soul Catcher. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1972.
19. The Godmakers. ["You Take the High Road", Astounding (May 1958); "Missing Link", Astounding (Feb 1959); "Operation Haystack", Astounding (May 1959); "The Priests of Psi", Fantastic (Feb 1960)]. 1972. London: New English Library, 1984.
20. Hellstrom's Hive. New York: Doubleday, 1973.
21. Direct Descent. New York: Ace Books, 1980.
22. The White Plague. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1982.
23. [with Brian Herbert] Man of Two Worlds (with Brian Herbert), New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1986.
24. High-Opp. WordFire Press, 2012.
25. Angels' Fall. WordFire Press, 2013.
26. A Game of Authors. WordFire Press, 2013.
27. A Thorn in the Bush. WordFire Press, 2014.

Short Story Collections:


28. The Worlds of Frank Herbert. 1970. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1975.
29. The Book of Frank Herbert. New York: DAW Books, 1973.
30. The Best of Frank Herbert. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1975.
31. The Priests of Psi. London: Gollancz Ltd, 1980.
32. Eye. Illustrated by Jim Burns. 1985. New English Library. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988.
33. [with Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson]. The Road to Dune. Foreword by Bill Ransom. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2005.
34. The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert. New York: Tor Books, 2014.

Secondary:


35. Brian Herbert. Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. New York: Tor Books, 2003

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The Dune Saga (1965-1986)

SF Luminaries: John Wyndham

John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos (1951 / 2009)

Plan for Chaos is a very odd book. It's certainly not without interest. However, I think one can see why no publishers actually leapt at the chance of putting it out back in the early 1950s when veteran Sci-fi writer Frederik Pohl (then moonlighting as a literary agent for John Wyndham and various other clients) was shopping it around New York.

There's the Nazi angle. In that respect, it serves as a precursor to Philip K. Dick's alternative history classic The Man in the High Castle (1962), or - for that matter - M. K. Joseph's Tomorrow the World, written in the late 1970s but only published posthumously in 2020.

There's the evil clone angle. In some ways it's very like Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976), only this time with flying saucers thrown in: quite a novel plot-twist for 1951, given that the expression wasn't actually coined until 1947, as a result of Kenneth Arnold's claim that the objects he saw on June 24 of that year "moved like saucers skipping across the water."

Amazing Stories (1946)

One can see so much in it, and yet it somehow doesn't quite work - it isn't visceral, actual, like his breakthrough title The Day of the Triffids (1951), or even its successor The Kraken Wakes (1953).

I'm not sure how much I need to say about them. I wrote a piece focussing on my early reading of The Day of the Triffids, in particular, in the introduction to my New Zealand Speculative Fiction website. I doubt that it's necessary to repeat all that here.

John Beynon: The Secret People (1935)

Nevertheless, having recently reread as much of his earlier work as I can easily access, it is facinating to see how many false starts one writer can have before settling into their mature style. There are flashes of Wyndham in all of the early novels, but the instinctively colonial attitudes displayed in both The Secret People (1935) and Planet Plane (1936) seem pretty repellent now.

John Beynon: Planet Plane (1936)

The John Wyndham heroine - smart, stylish, witty - familiar from later books begins to make an appearance quite early on, which is really the main attraction of these pre-war pulp serials and short stories. For those curious about how he came to create this character in the first place, Amy Binns' recent biography provides a number of new insights.

Amy Binns: Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters (2019)

It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that without her book, the so-called "invisible man of Science Fiction" would have remained a shadowy figure, accessible only through his witty prose and a set of curiously repetitive ideas. Fatherless children, wiser than their elders (Chocky, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos); alien invasions of the British countryside ("The Puff-Ball menace", The Day of the Triffids, Trouble with Lichen); the oppressive nature of conventional domesticity ("Dumb Martian," "Survival," "Compassion Circuit") ... Binns supplies vital information about Jack Harris's early life which make seem these far less unaccountable.

But literary talent is, of course, not readily reducible to any such set of causes. Why did it take him so long to break through? Why did he persevere in the face of such steady discouragement? Where did those Triffids really come from?

H. G. Wells: SF Masterworks Series

We'll never know. It is, however, safe to say that without H. G. Wells, there would have been no John Wyndham. So many of his ideas - not to mention the ease of his story telling - find their roots in the vast turbulent sea of Wells's oeuvre (particularly the early SF romances and short stories). But Wyndham is not Wells: he lacks his didactic bent, and has a healthy cynicism about the expression of great ideas. His appeal was to as much to the readers of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse as it was to hard-core Sci-fi fans.

I suppose that John Wyndham's real tragedy was that his success came so late, and that he died so young. But then, that's more our tragedy than his. There's no doubt that he had more to say, but the few books he did write remain classics of the genre. The fact that they're still in print after half a century rather speaks for itself.

The John Wyndham Omnibus (1979)

A great deal of incidental information about him is available online at the John Wyndham Archive website. Beyond that, much though I would recommend Amy Binns's well-written and insightful biography, your first stopping-place should be the books themselves - from the Triffids onwards, at any rate. If you don't find them charming and absorbing at first sight, chances are he's not for you.

Brian AldissBillion Year Spree (1973)

In his 1973 history of the SF genre, Billion (later revised to 'Trillion') Year Spree, Brian Aldiss described John Wyndham's breakout books as ‘cosy catastrophes’:

Both novels [The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes] were totally devoid of ideas but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, who enjoyed cosy disasters. Either it was something to do with the collapse of the British Empire, or the back-to-nature movement, or a general feeling that industrialization had gone too far, or all three.

Aldiss goes on to describe the characteristics of this ‘urbane and pleasing’ SF subgenre as follows:

The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off … Such novels are anxiety fantasies. They shade off towards the greater immediacy of World War III novels, a specialist branch of catastrophe more usually practiced by American writers.

He concludes with a rather premature epitaph on Wyndham and his ilk: ‘the race is not always to the swift, etc.’ Unfortunately, such dismissive judgements on a possible trade rival can cut both ways. Has Brian Aldiss himself fared much better?

Who (besides myself) now reads Non-stop (1958) or Hothouse (1962)? Who wades through The Malacia Tapestry or the Helliconia trilogy? Who remembers that one of Stanley Kubrick’s last film projects was an adaptation of Aldiss’s short story ‘Super-Toys Last All Season Long,’ which he delegated instead to Steven Spielberg, who turned it into the flawed, though not uninteresting, A.I.?

Steven Spielberg, dir.: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)

John Wyndham, by contrast, continues to be read. It seems safe to say now that he probably always will be. Aldiss's rather self-conscious attempts to be mod and up-to-the-minute sound even more uncomfortably dated now than what he saw as Wyndham's perverse determination to write "a kind of country-house science fiction."

And, as Hilaire Belloc once put it, speaking (perhaps) for all such writers who pop in and out of fashion with the passing years:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

Amy Binns: Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters (2019)

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John Wyndham (1903-1969)

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris
(1903-1969)

[His work appeared under a variety of pseudonyms, mostly constructed from his various initials: John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, John B. Harris, Johnson Harris, J. W. B. Harris, Lucas Parkes, Wyndham Parkes, & John Wyndham among them]

Novels:


1. [as 'John B. Harris']: The Curse of the Burdens. Aldine Mystery Novels No. 17 (London: Aldine Publishing Co. Ltd. 1927)


2. [as 'John Beynon']: The Secret People (1935)
   • The Secret People. 1935. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1972.


3. Foul Play Suspected (London: Newnes, 1935)


4. Planet Plane [aka 'The Space Machine'] (1936)
   • Stowaway to Mars. 1935. Coronet Books. 1972. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1977.


5. [as 'John Wyndham']: The Day of the Triffids [aka 'Revolt of the Triffids']. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954.


6. The Kraken Wakes [aka 'Out of the Deeps']. 1953. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


7. The Chrysalids [aka 'Re-Birth']. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.


8. The Midwich Cuckoos. 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.


9. Trouble with Lichen. 1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.


10. Chocky. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.


11. Web. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.


12. Plan for Chaos. Ed. David Ketterer & Andy Sawyer. 2009. Introduction by Christopher Priest. London: Penguin, 2010.


Short Story Collections:


13. Jizzle. 1954. Four Square. London: New English Library, 1973.
    1. Jizzle
    2. Technical Slip
    3. A Present from Brunswick
    4. Chinese Puzzle
    5. Esmeralda
    6. How Do I Do?
    7. Una
    8. Affair of the Heart
    9. Confidence Trick
    10. The Wheel
    11. Look Natural, Please!
    12. Perforce to Dream
    13. Reservation Deferred
    14. Heaven Scent
    15. More Spinned Against


14. The Seeds of Time. 1956. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
    1. Foreword by John Wyndham
    2. Chronoclasm
    3. Time To Rest
    4. Meteor
    5. Survival
    6. Pawley's Peepholes
    7. Opposite Number
    8. Pillar To Post
    9. Dumb Martian
    10. Compassion Circuit
    11. Wild Flower


15. Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter [US selection from 'Jizzle' and 'The Seeds of Time'] (1956)
    1. Chinese Puzzle
    2. Una
    3. The Wheel
    4. Jizzle
    5. Heaven Scent
    6. Compassion Circuit
    7. More Spinned Against
    8. A Present from Brunswick
    9. Confidence Trick
    10. Opposite Numbers
    11. Wild Flower


16. [with 'Lucas Parkes']: The Outward Urge. 1959 & 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
    1. The Space Station A.D. 1994 [aka 'For All the Night'] (1958)
    2. The Moon A.D. 2044 [aka 'Idiot’s Delight'] (1958)
    3. Mars A.D. 2094 [aka 'The Thin Gnat-Voices'] (1958)
    4. Venus A.D. 2144 [aka 'Space Is a Province of Brazil'] (1958)
    5. The Asteroids A.D. 2194 [aka 'The Emptiness of Space'] (1960)


17. Consider Her Ways and Others. 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
    1. Consider Her Ways
    2. Odd
    3. Stitch in Time
    4. Oh Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty?
    5. Random Quest
    6. A Long Spoon


18. The Infinite Moment [US edition of 'Consider Her Ways and Others', with two stories replaced] (1961)
    1. Consider Her Ways
    2. Odd
    3. How Do I Do
    4. Stitch In Time
    5. Random Quest
    6. Time Out


19. The Best of John Wyndham. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1973.
    1. The Lost Machine (1932)
    2. The Man from Beyond (1934)
    3. The Perfect Creature (1937)
    4. The Trojan Beam (1939)
    5. Vengeance by Proxy (1940)
    6. Adaptation (1949)
    7. Pawley's Peepholes (1951)
    8. The Red Stuff (1951)
    9. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1951)
    10. Dumb Martian (1952)
    11. Close Behind Him (1952)
    12. The Emptiness of Space (1960)


20. [as ‘John Beynon’]: Sleepers of Mars. Introduction by Walter Gillings. Coronet Books. 1973. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1973.
    1. The Fate of the Martians, by Walter Gillings
    2. Sleepers of Mars (1939)
    3. Worlds to Barter (1931)
    4. Invisible Monster (1933)
    5. The Man from Earth (1934)
    6. The Third Vibrator (1933)


21. [as ‘John Beynon Harris’]: Wanderers of Time. Introduction by Walter Gillings. Coronet Books. 1973. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1974.
    1. Before the Triffids, by Walter Gillings
    2. Wanderers of Time [aka 'Love in Time'] (1933)
    3. Derelict of Space (1939)
    4. Child of Power (1939)
    5. The Last Lunarians (1934)
    6. The Puff-Ball Menace [aka 'Spheres of Hell'] (1933)


22. [as ‘John Beynon’]: Exiles on Asperus. Coronet Books. 1979. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1980.
    1. Exiles on Asperus (1933)
    2. No Place Like Earth (1951)
    3. The Venus Adventure (1932)


23. No Place Like Earth [Some stories previously published in 'Jizzle', 'The Seeds of Time', 'Consider Her Ways and Others', Wanderers of Time' and 'Exiles on Asperus'] (2003)
    1. Derelict of Space
    2. Time to Rest
    3. No Place Like Earth
    4. In Outer Space There Shone a Star
    5. But a Kind of a Ghost
    6. The Cathedral Crypt
    7. A Life Postponed
    8. Technical Slip
    9. Una
    10. It's a Wise Child
    11. Pillar to Post
    12. The Stare
    13. Time Stops Today
    14. The Meddler
    15. Blackmoil
    16. A Long Spoon

Short stories:

[Included in Jizzle (1954); The Seeds of Time (1956);
Consider Her Ways and Others / The Infinite Moment {CW / IM} (1961);
Sleepers of Mars / Wanderers of Time / Exiles on Asperus {SM / WT / EA} (1973, 1974, 1979);
The Best of John Wyndham / No Place Like Earth {Best / NPE} (1973, 2003)]


1. Worlds to Barter {SM} (1931)
2. The Lost Machine {Best} (1932)
3. The Stare {NPE} (1932)
4. The Venus Adventure {EA} (1932)
5. Exiles on Asperus {EA} (1933)
6. Invisible Monster {SM} (1933)
7. The Puff-Ball Menace {WT} [aka 'Spheres of Hell'] (1933)
8. The Third Vibrator {SM} (1933)
9. Wanderers of Time {WT} [aka 'Love in Time'] (1933)
10. The Man from Earth {SM} [aka 'The Man from Beyond' {Best}] (1934)
11. The Last Lunarians {WT} [aka 'The Moon Devils'] (1934)
12. The Cathedral Crypt {NPE} (1935)
13. The Perfect Creature {Best} (1937)
14. Judson's Annihilator [aka 'Beyond the Screen'] (1938)
15. Sleepers of Mars {SM} (1938)
16. Child of Power {WT} (1939)
17. Derelict of Space {WT} {NPE} (1939)
18. The Trojan Beam {Best} (1939)
19. Vengeance by Proxy {Best} (1940)
20. Meteor (1941)
21. The Living Lies (1946)
22. Technical Slip {NPE} (1949)
23. Jizzle (1949)
24. Adaptation {Best} (1949)
25. Time to Rest {NPE} (1949)
26. The Eternal Eve (1950)
27. Pawley's Peepholes {Best} (1951)
28. The Red Stuff {Best} (1951)
29. No Place Like Earth {EA} {NPE} [aka 'Tyrant and Slave-Girl on Planet Venus'] (1951)
30. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down {Best} (1951)
31. A Present from Brunswick [aka 'Bargain from Brunswick'] (1951)
32. Pillar to Post {NPE} (1951)
33. The Wheel (1952)
34. Survival (1952)
35. Dumb Martian {Best} (1952)
36. Time Out {IM} (1953)
37. Close Behind Him {Best} (1953)
38. Time Stops Today {NPE} (1953)
39. Chinese Puzzle [aka 'A Stray from Cathay'] (1953)
40. Chronoclasm (1953)
41. Reservation Deferred (1953)
42. More Spinned Against (1953)
43. Confidence Trick (1953)
44. How Do I Do? {IM} (1953)
45. Affair of the Heart (1954)
46. Esmeralda (1954)
47. Heaven Scent (1954)
48. Look Natural, Please! (1954)
49. Never on Mars (1954)
50. Perforce to Dream (1954)
51. Una {NPE} (1954)
52. Opposite Number (1954)
53. Compassion Circuit (1954)
54. Wild Flower (1955)
55. Consider Her Ways {CW / IM} (1956)
56. But a Kind of Ghost {NPE} (1957)
57. The Meddler {NPE} (1958)
58. For All the Night [aka 'The Space Station A.D. 1994' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
59. Idiot’s Delight [aka 'The Moon A.D. 2044' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
60. The Thin Gnat-Voices [aka 'Mars A.D. 2094' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
61. Space Is a Province of Brazil [aka 'Venus A.D. 2144' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
62. A Long Spoon {CW} {NPE} (1960)
63. The Emptiness of Space [aka 'The Asteroids A.D. 2194' - from The Outward Urge] {Best} (1960)
64. Odd {CW / IM} (1961)
65. Oh, Where, Now, Is Peggy MacRafferty? {CW} (1961)
66. Random Quest {CW / IM} (1961)
67. Stitch in Time {CW / IM} (1961)
68. It's a Wise Child {NPE} (1962)
69. Chocky (1963)
70. In Outer Space There Shone a Star {NPE} (1965)
71. A Life Postponed {NPE} (1968)
72. 'Phase Two': Excerpt (1973)
73. Vivisection (2000)
74. Blackmoil {NPE} (2003)

Secondary:


24. Amy Binns. Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters. London: Grace Judson Press, 2019.

•


John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos (2009)

SF Luminaries: William Golding

John Carey: William Golding (2009)

The Man Who Wrote ...

There's a - probably apocryphal - saying attributed to Oscar Wilde: "There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them. The other is to prefer The Importance of Being Earnest."

Something similar would seem to apply to William Golding. Either you've never read him at all, or you've only read Lord of the Flies and didn't realise he'd written anything else.

William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

But of course he did. The question is whether anything else in his oeuvre matches that first, miraculous, epoch-making success - one of the few novels, along with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and The Catcher in the Rye, to achieve lasting name recognition, and (what's more) to equate with a particular view of the world.

Even if you've never actually read any of them, you've no doubt already gathered that 1984 is about totalitarianism, Brave New World is about hedonistic excess, and The Catcher in the Rye is about the clash between youthful idealism and the compromises required by the adult world. As a label, Lord of the Flies stands in similarly for reversion to barbarism the moment societal constraints are removed.

Can it really be called a work of SF? Well, technically, yes, it would have to be defined that way. It's set in the (then) near future, after an atomic war, and while it might seem to deal with 'eternal human values', they're very neatly confined to the customs and mores of British schoolchildren of a particular era, the 1950s.

William Golding: To the Ends of the Earth (1992)

As you can see from the bibliography below, Golding published twelve novels in all. They include the nineteenth-century sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, another couple of historical novels (The Spire and The Double Tongue), together with various tales of contemporary life.

William Golding: Pincher Martin (1956)

Among the most fascinating of his works are the brilliantly imaginative psychological tour-de-force Pincher Martin, about the last moments of a drowning sailor, and the prehistoric fantasy The Inheritors, about the first encounter between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon men.

William Golding: The Inheritors (1955)

Under which King ... ?

It made a big difference to the reputation (and sales) of a twentieth-century novelist whether or not they were corralled in some 'genre' ghetto, or could be regarded as reliably 'mainstream.'

Golding's inclusion in a 1956 anthology of stories, Sometime, Never, with SF stalwart John Wyndham and Fantasy writer and artist Mervyn Peake, signals his somewhat equivocal status at this early point in his career.

William Golding, John Wyndham, & Mervyn Peake: Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination (1956)

To be honest, his first two novels could have been read either way, as 'SF' or mainstream. Nor was Pincher Martin much help, though it did signal a relentlessly experimental bent in his approach to fiction. Free Fall (1959) is more acceptably autobiographical in nature, and also includes elements of the spiritual questing characteristic of such luminaries of the post-war British novel as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

After that it became clear that - whatever occasional flirtations he might have with 'genre' themes and fascinations - he was to be marketed as an occasionally 'difficult' modern novelist, rather than as any kind of pulp affiliate. He had more in common - in publishing terms, at least - with Patrick White or Janet Frame than with his near-contemporary Arthur C. Clarke.

The brilliance of Golding's prose at every stage of his career - and his recurrent set of obsessions: Ancient Greece and Egypt, visionary experience, and the ongoing effects of the Second World War - combined with his predominant theme of the loss of innocence, make this an understandable decision. For all their skill and intensity as writers, neither John Wyndham or Mervyn Peake could be said to chafe against their genre confines as much as Golding.

Nevertheless, it has - somewhat paradoxically - led to the unfair dismissal of Golding as a 'one-book man', since none of his subsequent works achieved the quasi-mythic status of Lord of the Flies.

William Golding: The Paper Men (1984)

In fact, I'd say that my dominant impression of Golding's work as a whole is variety. It was never possible to predict what era (or genre) he would attach himself to next. Who, for instance, after reading those intense social novels of his middle years, followed by the rather tired satire of The Paper Men, could have foreseen the swashbuckling readability of his late sea trilogy?

And while he never completed his revisions to it, his final novel The Double Tongue, narrated in the first person by the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, is as clear and arresting as anything he ever wrote.

He's well worth rediscovering. If you've never read any of his books except Lord of the Flies, you're in for a bit of a surprise. At times one wonders how he got away with such daring departures from the literary norm. I suppose because that first book kept on selling, his publishers continued to indulge him in the hopes that he'd do it again.

He never did. But in the process he became an inspiration for anyone dissatisfied with the status quo. It's not that his work is ever uncontrolled - on the contrary, he's one of the most fastidious of literary craftsmen. It's just that he seemed to have no fear of extremities in his work: no theme - madness, cannibalism, eternal damnation - seems to have been untouchable for him.

William Golding: The Double Tongue (1995)

The Monster

Of course, one reason for this may have been his own self-definition as a 'monster':

Golding kept a personal journal for over 22 years from 1971 until the night before his death ... The journal was initially used by Golding in order to record his dreams, but over time it gradually began to function as a record of his life ... At one point Golding describes setting his students up into two groups to fight each other - an experience he drew on when writing Lord of the Flies. John Carey, Emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was eventually given 'unprecedented access to Golding’s unpublished papers and journals by the Golding estate'.

- Wikipedia

"I do not know," said Carey in his biography of Golding, "why he thought he was a monster." He ends his long account, however, by admitting there may be a primal scene, a hidden obscenity, that still eludes him – "something I have not discovered".

Guardian reviewer Peter Conrad considers this quiet admission of defeat a distinct cop-out for any biographer: "Carey documents Golding's ogre-like antics, but is reluctant to speculate about their origins." Conrad himself has no such qualms:

Golding called himself a monster. His imagination lodged a horde of demons, buzzing like flies inside his haunted head, and his dreams rehearsed his guilt in scenarios that read like sketches for incidents in his novels, which they often were. After dark, his mother became a murderous maniac, hurling knives, shards of shattered mirror or metal pots of scalding tea at little William; a girlfriend he had cast off returned as a stiffened corpse, which he watched himself trying to bury in the garden. At his finest, Golding paid traumatised tribute to the pain of other creatures, like the hooked octopus he once saw impaled by the "vulnerable, vulvar sensitive flesh" of its pink, screaming mouth, or a rabbit he shot in Cornwall, which stared at him before it fell with "a combination of astonishment and outrage".
But pity didn't prohibit him from firing the shot. He understood the Nazis, he said, because he was "of that sort by nature". His sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl has been titillatingly leaked to publicise Carey's biography. More generally, his son-in-law testifies that Golding specialised in belittling others – if that is, he recognised them at all. As Carey notes, he chronically misspelt names because he couldn't be bothered with people and their pesky claim to exist.

- Peter Conrad, The Guardian (30/8/2009)

William Golding: The Scorpion God (1971)

So, a drunk, a snob, a possible rapist ... Conrad concludes his review by speculating that "it may be that Carey is too sane or puritanical to comprehend the creative madness of his subject."

In Carey's defence, it should be said that he provides abundant evidence of all these aspects of Golding's personality - but also of his more loveable, less 'monstrous' traits. What's more, much of this self-condemnation comes from the pages of Golding's own dream-diary, which is far from being an objective source.

Carey does, admittedly, stick closely to the script of the documents he's been handed. But that may turn out, in the long run, to be the most valuable thing about his very unhysterical account of Golding's OTT imaginings about his own life. The heightening required to manufacture his fictions may always have lived more in the imagination than in the cold light of day.

Finally, who knows? Both Carey and Conrad are in agreement on the fact that Golding was not always a particularly pleasant person to be around. As the latter records:

His worst rampages occurred when he was drunk. Once, staying at a friend's house in London, Golding awoke in panic and dismembered a Bob Dylan puppet because he thought it was Satan.

Luckily his work can now be confidently claimed to have outlived such considerations. What's more, Carey includes a list of as-yet-unpublished "early drafts for published novels or extracts from projects unjustifiably abandoned," at least some of which will surely be allowed to appear at some point?

a "magnificent" but unfinished work of Homeric science fiction, a memoir that was self-censored because too raw, a film script about a traffic jam that rehearses the Apocalypse, a first version of The Inheritors that "cries out to be published as a novel in its own right" and a segment excised from Darkness Visible that is also "a masterpiece crying out for publication".

At the time, 1983, he seemed an odd choice for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Posterity may yet vindicate the judgement of the Swedish Academy.

Golding & King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (1983)

•


William Golding (1983)

Sir William Gerald Golding
(1911-1993)

Novels:


1. Lord of the Flies. 1954. London: Faber, 1954.
2. The Inheritors. 1955. London: Faber, 1975.
3. Pincher Martin. London: Faber, 1956.
4. Free Fall. 1959. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
5. The Spire. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1964.
6. The Pyramid. 1967. London: Faber, 1969.
7. Darkness Visible. 1979. London: Faber, 1981.
8. The Paper Men. London: Faber, 1984.
9. To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy, comprising Rites of Passage; Close Quarters; and Fire Down Below. 1980, 1987 & 1989. London: Faber, 1992.
10. The Double Tongue. London: Faber, 1995.

Stories:


11. Golding, William, John Wyndham, & Mervyn Peake. Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956.
12. The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels. 1971. London: Faber, 1973.

Drama:


13. The Brass Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts. 1958. Faber School Editions. London: Faber, 1963.

Non-fiction:


14. The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces. 1965. London: Faber, 1984.
15. A Moving Target. London: Faber, 1982.
16. An Egyptian Journal. London: Faber, 1985.

Secondary:


17. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, & Ian Gregor. William Golding: A Critical Study. 1967. London: Faber, 1984.
18. John Carey. William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies - A Life. London: Faber, 2009.

William Golding: Plaque (1945-62)

SF Luminaries: Jules Verne

Étienne Carjat: Jules Verne (1884)

It's hard to communicate the strange charm of Jules Verne's books to anyone who wasn't lucky enough to read them at the right age - maybe somewhere between 10 and 17? Their merits are not readily apparent on the surface: clumsy dialogue, ridiculously implausible events, a backdrop of misinformation about virtually every corner of the world ... And yet, and yet ...

Jules Verne: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864 / 1874)

I suppose that my favourite remains Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I loved the characters' long voyage to Iceland before they even started to make their descent in the footsteps of that intrepid 16th century alchemist, Arne Saknussemm. I liked the cryptogram and complex clues they had to solve along the way, and Verne's vision of the Earth's interior was suitably awe-inspiring.

Henry Levin, dir.: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
l-r: Pat Boone, Peter Ronson, James Mason, & Arlene Dahl

It did come as a bit of a shock when I watched the film version of the novel on TV, only to discover that the setting had been shifted from Hamburg to Edinburgh, and a love interest and villainous saboteur added to the plot! It was still fun, but virtually all the complexities which made the novel so rewarding seemed to have been removed.

Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-70 / 1976)

The same, alas, was true of probably his most famous novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The version above, edited by Walter James Miller, restores to the text all the passages generally removed in English translation. The editor points out that there's a simple reason why Verne is regarded as essentialy a children's writer in English whereas his works are taken quite seriously in France: because we're not actually reading the same book.

Richard Fleischer, dir.: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

By comparison with the sins of his various translators, the sins of the above adaptation seem quite venial (though Kirk Douglas's singing is a heavy price to have to pay for admission). James Mason makes an excellent, brooding Captain Nemo, though admittedly the character's Indian heritage is left in the background.

Gary Gianni: Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (2009)

Verne has been quite well served by his various illustrators over the years, however. The above graphic adaptation leans heavily on the brooding, Doré-influenced style of the original nineteenth-century editions. The chapter on Atlantis is one of the highlights of the novel, along with the famous encounter with a giant squid!

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville: Atlantis (1870)

Which brings us to a confession. I'm afraid I have to admit to having read quite a few of Verne's works as Classics Illustrated comics rather than as books. To this day, for instance, I've never actually read Off on a Comet, but the comic below was one of my favourites.

Jules Verne: Off on a Comet (Classics Illustrated, 1959-60)

Others, such as From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon I read both as comics and, subsequently, novels. It all depended on which ones my parents had copies of, and - more to the point - which of them had found their way to the shelves of my Intermediate and Secondary School libraries.

Victor G. Ambrus: Jules Verne's A Long Vacation (1888 / 1967)

After Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the above translation of Verne's Deux ans de vacance [A Two-Year Holiday] was my all-time favourite. I'm not quite sure why. There was a curious atmosphere about the book which seemed to transcend its fairly familiar Robinson Crusoe-esque plot (what the French call a 'Robinsonade'). It helped that the characters were all supposed to be pupils at a school in Auckland, New Zealand who'd ended up on a desert island by mistake - but that wasn't the main reason.

Jules Verne: The Mysterious Island (1874-75 / 1965)

I guess its rather plotless, episodic structure made it seem more like life than some of his more intricately woven stories. Much though I subsequently enjoyed reading The Mysterious Island (in the Airmont Classics edition pictured above), I couldn't believe in it the way I did in A Long Vacation.

Victor Ambrus (1935- )

Recently I made the experiment of rereading the book, having run across a copy in a second-hand bookshop. Its allure had faded somewhat, I must confess, but it was still an interesting and occasionally atmospheric book. Sometimes you do have to encounter a book at the right age for it to leave an indelible impression, though - the Victor Ambrus illustrations still seem as magical as ever to me.

Jules Verne: Les Voyages Extraordinaires. 32 vols (Édition Jean de Bonnot, 1976)

Once or twice I've toyed with the idea of buying a complete set of the Voyages Extraordinaires in French. If I were to ever see such a thing on sale, I suspect I would. Calculating just how much it would cost to have it sent out here (and trying to think where I could possibly put it) has put me off so far, however.

Jules Verne: Les Voyages Extraordinaires. 32 vols (Édition Jean de Bonnot, 1976)

And do I really want to read all of them? Apart from the bona fide masterpieces, some of them can be pretty tough going, I've found. The English translations simply aren't reliable enough to be worth reading en masse, however, so it's a project I'll continue to think about.

Georges Perec (1936-1982)

Georges Perec, probably my favourite twentieth-century French writer, was a Jules Verne obsessive, and constantly made references to him in his works. For Perec, I think Verne represented the storytelling impulse at its most pure and unselfconscious.

Georges Perec: W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975)

In such books as his fictional memoir W, or the Memory of Childhood, Perec interweaves his reconstruction of a (now lost) Verne-like adventure story he wrote as a schoolboy with the dawning awareness of his status as a Jewish child in hiding in wartime France, along with the knowledge he subsequently obtained of his mother's death in Auschwitz.

David Bellos: Georges Perec: A Life in Words (1975)

One reason for the celebrated inaccuracies of Verne's settings - Pacific islands full of kangaroos and Kauri trees, savage tribes in the middle of sober colonial empires - was the fact that they were mostly based on clippings from magazines, collected and classified in an immense set of filing cabinets by the desk-bound Verne, who never actually travelled to any of the places he described in his books.

This may have been one of the reasons why he became an essential alter-ego for Perec. Where the former could welcome Modernity with boosterish enthusiasm, the latter, who sought a not dissimilar refuge in his crossword puzzles and word games, was foredoomed from childhood to be one of its victims.

Peter Costello: Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (1978)

In this Steampunk-infested age, it seems odd that its enthusiasts don't read and talk more about Jules Verne. It's hard to exaggerate his influence on his own time and the progress of Science Fiction over the century to follow.

He's still one of the world's best-known and most translated writers, like it or not, and his swashbuckling approach to narrative can be seen clearly in the early American pulp magazines, as well as in such isolated works as New Zealand's first homegrown SF novel, The Great Romance.

'The Inhabitant': The Great Romance (1881)

•


Georges Roux: Hetzel Advertisement (1890)

Jules Gabriel Verne
(1828-1905)

Voyages extraordinaires [published in Verne's lifetime]:


1. Cinq Semaines en ballon. [Five Weeks in a Balloon] (1863)
2. Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras. [The Adventures of Captain Hatteras]. Serialised 1864–5 (1866)
3. Voyage au centre de la Terre. [Journey to the Center of the Earth] (1864)
   • Voyage au centre de la terre. 1864. Les Voyages Extraordinaires. Collection Hetzel. Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1919.
   • Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 1864. Trans. Robert Baldick. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
4. De la Terre à la Lune. [From the Earth to the Moon]. Serialised 1865 (1865)
   • From the Earth to the Moon. 1865. A Digit Book. London: Brown, Watson, Ltd., 1958.
   • Classic Science Fiction: Three Complete Illustrated Novels - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / From the Earth to the Moon / Round the Moon. 1869-70, 1865, 1869-70. Introduction by Alan K. Russell. Castle Books. Secausus, N.J.: Book Sales Inc., 1981.
5. Les Enfants du capitaine Grant. [In Search of the Castaways]. Serialised 1865–7 (1867–8)
6. Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers. [Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea]. Serialised 1869–70 (1869–70)
   • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 1869-70. Illustrated by Peter Henville. 1955. London: The Heirloom Library, 1956.
   • The Annotated Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Ed. Walter James Miller. New York: Thomas J. Crowell, 1976.
   • Classic Science Fiction: Three Complete Illustrated Novels - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / From the Earth to the Moon / Round the Moon. 1869-70, 1865, 1869-70. Introduction by Alan K. Russell. Castle Books. Secausus, N.J.: Book Sales Inc., 1981.
7. Autour de la Lune. [Around the Moon]. Serialised 1869 (1870)
   • Round the Moon. 1869-70. The Royal Series. 1958. London: Ward, Lock & Co., Ltd., 1963.
   • Classic Science Fiction: Three Complete Illustrated Novels - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / From the Earth to the Moon / Round the Moon. 1869-70, 1865, 1869-70. Introduction by Alan K. Russell. Castle Books. Secausus, N.J.: Book Sales Inc., 1981.
8. Une Ville flottante. [A Floating City]. Serialised 1870 (1871)
9. Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais. [The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa]. Serialised 1871–2 (1872)
10. Le Pays des fourrures. [The Fur Country]. Serialised 1872–3 (1873)
11. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. [Around the World in Eighty Days]. Serialised 1872 (1873)
    • Round the World in Eighty Days. 1873. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1956.
12. L'Île mystérieuse. [The Mysterious Island]. Serialised 1874–5 (1874–5)
    • L’île mystérieuse. 1875. Maxi-poche. Classiques Français. Paris: Bookking International, 1995.
    • The Mysterious Island. 1875. Introduction by Raymond R. Canon. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Ltd., 1965.
13. Le Chancellor. [The Survivors of the Chancellor]. Serialised 1874–5 (1875)
14. Michel Strogoff. [Michael Strogoff]. Serialised 1876 (1876)
15. Hector Servadac. [Off on a Comet]. Serialised 1877 (1877)
16. Les Indes noires. [The Child of the Cavern]. Serialised 1877 (1877)
17. Un Capitaine de quinze ans. [Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen]. Serialised 1878 (1878)
18. Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum. [The Begum's Fortune]. Serialised 1879 (1879)
19. Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine. [Tribulations of a Chinaman in China]. Serialised 1879 (1879)
20. La Maison à vapeur. [The Steam House]. Serialised 1879–80 (1880)
21. La Jangada. [Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon]. Serialised 1881 (1881)
22. L'École des Robinsons. [Godfrey Morgan]. Serialised 1882 (1882)
23. Le Rayon vert. [The Green Ray]. Serialised 1882 (1882)
24. Kéraban-le-têtu. [Kéraban the Inflexible]. Serialised 1883 (1883)
25. L'Étoile du sud. [The Vanished Diamond]. Serialised 1884 (1884)
26. L'Archipel en feu. [The Archipelago on Fire]. Serialised 1884 (1884)
27. Mathias Sandorf. [Mathias Sandorf]. Serialised 1885 (1885)
28. Un Billet de loterie. [The Lottery Ticket]. Serialised 1886 (1886)
29. Robur-le-Conquérant. [Robur the Conqueror]. Serialised 1886 (1886)
30. Nord contre Sud. [North Against South]. Serialised 1887 (1887)
31. Le Chemin de France. [The Flight to France]. Serialised 1887 (1887)
32. Deux Ans de vacances. [Two Years' Vacation]. Serialised 1888 (1888)
    • A Long Vacation. 1888. Trans. Olga Marx. Illustrated by Victor G. Ambrus. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
33. Famille-sans-nom. [Family Without a Name]. Serialised 1889 (1889)
34. Sans dessus dessous. [The Purchase of the North Pole] (1889)
35. César Cascabel. [César Cascabel]. Serialised 1890 (1890)
36. Mistress Branican. [Mistress Branican]. Serialised 1891 (1891)
37. Le Château des Carpathes. [Carpathian Castle]. Serialised 1892 (1892)
38. Claudius Bombarnac. [Claudius Bombarnac]. Serialised 1892 (1893)
39. P'tit-Bonhomme. [Foundling Mick]. Serialised 1893 (1893)
40. Mirifiques Aventures de Maître Antifer. [Captain Antifer]. Serialised 1894 (1894)
41. L'Île à hélice. [Propeller Island]. Serialised 1895 (1895)
42. Face au drapeau. [Facing the Flag]. Serialised 1896 (1896)
43. Clovis Dardentor. [Clovis Dardentor]. Serialised 1896 (1896)
44. Le Sphinx des glaces. [An Antarctic Mystery]. Serialised 1897 (1897)
45. Le Superbe Orénoque. [The Mighty Orinoco]. Serialised 1898 (1898)
46. Le Testament d'un excentrique. [The Will of an Eccentric]. Serialised 1899 (1899)
47. Seconde Patrie. [The Castaways of the Flag]. Serialised 1900 (1900)
48. Le Village aérien. [The Village in the Treetops]. Serialised 1901 (1901)
49. Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin. [The Sea Serpent]. Serialised 1901 (1901)
50. Les Frères Kip. [The Kip Brothers]. Serialised 1902 (1902)
51. Bourses de voyage. [Travel Scholarships]. Serialised 1903 (1903)
52. Un Drame en Livonie. [A Drama in Livonia]. Serialised 1904 (1904)
53. Maître du monde. [Master of the World]. Serialised 1904 (1904)
54. L'Invasion de la mer. [Invasion of the Sea]. Serialised 1905 (1905)

Posthumous additions [extensively rewritten or composed by Verne's son Michel]:


55. Le Phare du bout du monde. [The Lighthouse at the End of the World]. Serialised 1905 (1905)
56. Le Volcan d’or. [The Golden Volcano]. Serialised 1906 (1906)
57. L’Agence Thompson and Co. [The Thompson Travel Agency]. Serialised 1907 (1907)
58. La Chasse au météore. [The Chase of the Golden Meteor]. Serialised 1908 (1908)
59. Le Pilote du Danube. [The Danube Pilot]. Serialised 1908 (1908)
60. Les Naufragés du "Jonathan". [The Survivors of the "Jonathan"]. Serialised 1909 (1909)
61. Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz. [The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz]. Serialised 1910 (1910)
62. L’Étonnante Aventure de la mission Barsac. [The Barsac Mission]. Serialised 1914 (1920)


Other novels:


63. Voyage en Angleterre et en Ecosse. [Backwards to Britain]. 1860 (first published 1989)
64. Paris au XXe siècle. [Paris in the Twentieth Century]. 1863 (first published 1994)

Secondary:


65. Costello, Peter. Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.

•


Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville: Captain Nemo (1870)