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)

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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.

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

The Mysteries of Ashburton

The Turrets of the Ashburton Post Office (1901)

A lot of people have used that title - The Mysteries of ... [somewhere or other] - since Ann Radcliffe first dreamed it up in 1794. She may have been laughed off stage by Jane Austen in her early novel Northanger Abbey, but Radcliffe's Gothic cliffhangers remain surprisingly readable:

Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

The most famous example of this would have to be Eugène Sue's phenomenally successful serial Les Mystères de Paris, which - when eventually collected in book-form - ran to over a thousand pages of blood-and-thunder romance:

Eugène Sue: The Mysteries of Paris (1842-43)

Eugène Sue's book also gave rise to the (so-called) "city mysteries" fictional subgenre, which eventually included:

• George W. M. Reynolds' The Mysteries of London (1844)
• Paul Féval's Les Mystères de Londres (1844)
• August Brass's Die Mysterien von Berlin (1844)
• L. van Eikenhorst's De Verborgenheden van Amsterdam (1844)
• Johann Wilhelm Christern's Die Geheimnisse von Hamburg (1845)
• Ned Buntline's The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848)
• Camilo Castelo Branco's Os Mistérios de Lisboa (1854)
• Émile Zola's Les Mystères de Marseille (1867)
• Francesco Mastriani's I misteri di Napoli (1869-70)

and many, many others - culminating in Michael Chabon's affectionate hommage to the form, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988).

Michael Chabon: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988 / 2008)

But how does all this connect up with Ashburton, the ostensible subject of this post? Besides that extraordinary shot of the Ashburton Post Office above, there are many other reasons for finding Ashburton a strangely interesting place.

Ashburton Post Office - cut-down and changed - (1950s)

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Or so we thought, at any rate, when we arranged to spend some time there earlier this month:

HEARTLAND HOUSE
[unless otherwise attributed, the photos in this post are by Bronwyn Lloyd (7/1/19)]

What on earth is this extraordinary structure, for instance? A piece of monumental art? A public convenience? It certainly serves to mark off very emphatically the railway lines which run straight through the centre of town from the rest of the Ashburton CBD.

The rails run south-west

The rails run north-east

they're echoed by these curious ley-lines on the nearby domain

which led us to a grove of trees

with some stones to one side

disfigured by graffiti

Does the inscription read "f O R e s t"? Or could it be "f [infinity sign] r s t"? It's hard to tell. The first would certainly make the most sense, but that sideways eight does seem visible, also.

stone "Z" (or "V")

The stones, too, are in the shape of a symbol of some kind: perhaps an arrowhead? Is it pointing somewhere? Or is it indeed that "X marks the spot"?

musing on the connections

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Unimpressive, you think? You were expecting a little more? Wait, there's more ...

Janet Frame: Living in the Maniototo (1979)

The idea of a grove of trees labelled "forest" reminds me a little of the moment in Janet Frame's late novel Living in the Maniototo when one of her characters, obsessed with the idea of taking a long journey through the desert, decides to undertake a short test-run near Berkeley, California. The other members of the group "deposit Roger beneath a road-sign marked ‘DESERT’." One of them comments:

it doesn’t seem real. In a country like the USA where public information is intimate and discursive, you don’t see abrupt signs like that! [171]

As Matt Harris unpacks the scene in his 2012 Doctoral thesis, Metafiction in New Zealand from the 1960s to the present day:

The sign is less designating a geographical region than it is a linguistic marking of the boundary between reality and the quixotic imagination. This is the ‘DESERT’, but not the desert Roger had idealised. ... Although he is certain that he will experience an epiphany, if not on this simulated journey then on a later journey across one of the great deserts, no such revelation is forthcoming and he begins to “feel irritated with himself for his engrossing concern for the “real” desert, the “real” journey so vivid in his mind …” [175] Perhaps unsurprisingly, Roger decides at the end of his sojourn that the real journey might not be necessary. “Why indeed go into a “real”, “utter” desert?” he asks himself. “It was in trying to test the reality that one met all the problems and failures, not only of the thing itself but of the mind that is occupied obsessively with dualism.” [185]

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David Elliott: Hunting Snarks in the Antipathies (Ashburton Art Gallery: 5/11-18-10/2/19)

So what's so significant about Ashburton? What brings in visitors - besides those who simply stop in briefly on their way down the Coast Road from Christchurch to Dunedin? The main things Trip Advisor can find to mention are: the Ashburton Domain (pictured above), the Ashburton Art Gallery (which had on, during our stay, an intriguing exhibition called Snark: A Victorian Odyssey, inspired by Lewis Carroll's famous poem); The Plains Vintage Railway & Historical Museum; skydiving; and trout-fishing.

As well as all these, I'd add the fact that there's a rather marvellous bookshop just a few kilometres out of town:

Chertsey Book Barn (7/1/19)

What I didn't find in there, though, despite an extensive search, was a copy of Ashburton's principal literary claim to fame: the pioneering science fiction novel entitled The Great Romance (1881), published pseudonymously by someone describing himself simply as "The Inhabitant", and printed on the presses of the local newspaper.

Dominic Alessio, ed. The Great Romance (1881 / 2008)

And, yes, it was that which drew me to Ashburton. Not that I expected to pick up any real clues about the identity of its author, or even - really - to flesh out any of its narrative details with local colour, but really just to get a sense of the place: 138 years later, admittedly, but sometimes you can catch a lucky break on these little expeditions.

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Karl Tate: Inside the Planet Venus (2012)

Here are some extracts from "The Inhabitant"'s account of his heroes - Weir, Moxton and Hope's - approach to the planet Venus in their space ship Star Climber:

The poles of the planet Venus are at such an angle that about half the planet enjoys alternately a day of three months — a long dim day of twilight, and then night; as a natural consequence, the regions approaching this country are strangely affected. When we woke in the morning we saw the first proof of this in the low sun, still hanging at the same altitude, the live-long night he had been thus creeping around, so that here there was no day or night, morning or evening, and the waste of desert around us seemed as if made for these monotonous periods.

We spread out the wings of our vessel and went on our way ... We had determined to go right over the pole of the planet, but, as we did not like to shut ourselves up again, we were soon obliged by the rarified air to turn to the lower and warmer regions, going away swiftly till grass and wood and water again began to reign, then sailing slowly, and not too high, that we might observe if anything like humanity should appear — we saw troops of beasts, four-legged and two-legged—ape-like creatures — kangaroo, or more properly three-legged animals; but none of them seemed struck with wonder as we glided slowly above them — they all fed and played and fought, as though there were nothing new under their Heaven, and if we swept down near them went away with screams and cries to their shelters. Their forms were very strange — ever recalling something we knew, yet always differing from it; yet what we most noticed — what seemed to be an unvarying characteristic — was that, whether large or small, they all moved in troops and bands, all fed and fought together, and all seemed well provided for either attack or defense; but nothing human appeared, nought of a nature similar to our own.

I can hardly tell how much we wished — how our hearts would have gone out towards any living creature which should have risen above the level of the animal world, or how out thoughts wondered over the intellectual union which might arise, should two such experiences join their pleasures, their results; yet here there was enough to recall the wildest wandering thoughts, as we went hither and thither to and from every new object, everything that promised a revelation, over lakes and mountains, rivers and forests, till we felt ourselves in the tropical regions, with the high sun blazing overhead, and the great bush herbage, and vast trees all about us.

- The Great Romance, Volume One: chapter XII

Is it just me, or is there a certain sense of the Antipodes of our own planet in these descriptions? The kangaroos, and the 'great bush herbage, and vast trees all around us'?

Presumably, given the date of his story, this "inhabitant" must have been an immigrant to New Zealand, and his voyage from the cities of the future described in the first section of his novel, to these more verdant regions, does sound like lived experience, however much he's tried to mask the fact with these interplanetary trimmings.

Yet none of this would please Moxton, he would press on to the winter half of the planet, to the land of shadow, and we expected of ice and snow, for warm as the planet was, we thought that three months' exclusion from the sun's heat, would bring the temperature very low. Yet we could not help lingering, turning to each new beauty of flower and fruit, leaf, or herbage, skimming near the edge of the forest, or the waters of the rivers, hoping to see some new elephant or huge mastodon ... So we were borne steadily onward through the fresh air of the new world — were always eager to behold something fresh — unsatisfied with the wonders of Heaven — we seemed to forget the leagues that we had travelled, unmindful of our great fate, to run like older babes in the wood from flower to flower as fancy guided us.

Yet stopping often as we did, our immense speed led us fast from clime to clime, and before the natural day would decline the sun began to grow low on the northern horizon; the tropical forests to be replaced by grassy plains and rolling, scantily timbered hills. Sometimes, too, we came on arid sand — huge dry deserts without even the proverbial vulture to enliven them; then succeeded strange twilight, with the sun low down, and its beams striking along the world — the air seemed to grow vague and yellow, a thickness and foggyness pervaded everything. How changed seemed the vegetation — rotting leaves and bare boughs; huge stalked grass, half-decayed — and here, too, we saw more birds, great downy owls, and bats to which the devil of the middle ages was a mild creature, it also seemed the land of frogs and toads — huge speckled tawny creatures, not good to look at; and the vegetation altered fast now, the reign of the fungus seemed to have begun — the ground, the trees, the water, were covered with minute forms, and in the opener spaces huge growths stranger than the cactus or fungus of the world, immense groups of all shapes, so strange were they, that even Moxton agreed to come to a stand for a while.

Lake Heron, North Canterbury

After they land, it is agreed that Weir and Moxton will continue their explorations in Star Climber, while John Bentford Hope stays behind on the surface of Venus. The place they choose to leave him in is described as follows:

We had selected a spot some hundreds of feet above the common level, for here all the water seemed land-locked, standing like inland lakes at all sorts of heights, rising and falling, with the season, and with no general inter-communication. It was a fine sweeping plain within the tropics, but kept cool by its elevation, and by the fact that on the still higher ground spread a large lake. There were a few trees scattered here and there, sometimes in clumps, and under a near group I had a large tent fixed for comfort in the warmer weather. [64]

"There is no doubt we were fools," said Weir, "to arrange to leave you here. There [could be] many things on this planet of which we know nothing - even the beasts have almost sense enough to besiege you. If I were you I should not travel except in the air. You are quite safe in that little boat, and even when you are about here I would always keep a revolver in my hand - make a habit of it." [67]

As it turns out, though, Hope has no need to travel in order to find out more about the planet's inhabitants. Instead, they come calling on him: a pair of aliens, with "intelligence, knowledge, in every line of their features, and with low, strange voices" [71-2]:

I woke to the sense of their presence, to seem them gazing down, arms linked to each other, male and female, gazing with soft eyes on my yet recumbent figure, their fine bodies covered with a down - neither of bird nor animal - soft and dark, and their heavy, lithe limbs, such as might have developed form the earliest of prehistoric elephant, had not the heat of a younger world debased him, and nature's giant youth pushed him in her recklessness to balk rather than serve. [71]

Jean de Brunhoff: Babar & Celeste Camping (1931)

Judging from the description above, they sound a little like clones of Babar the Elephant. It's hard not to humanise them in one's own imagination, though.

"Their little attentions to each other ... were so new and original, that I was occupied with but watching them. These were not savages, and how far removed from animals" [72]

After they've visited with him for a bit, the two aliens - refusing his invitation to enter Hope's "castle" (as he calls it). Instead:

"They led me to the borders of the upland lake, and there under the tall herbage was a rude boat, or rather raft. They evidently wished me to embark with them, but to this I would not consent, and after a while they left me, promising, as far as signs could point, to return again." [73]

Instead, Hope himself fires up his airship, the Midge ("she could run, or fly, or swim" [76]) and pursues them to the upland lake they'd rowed across the previous day.

"What should I call them? By what name should I think of them? ... then I thought of the star, the planet of love, and determined to call them by it, namely, Venus, and by that name they were afterwards known." [76]

The Venuses lead him trustingly back to their home, "a small mossy cabin, with a strange, bird-like air pervading it," where they appear to live all on their own:

But were they indeed so completely alone? I thought and asked, as I looked out again and could see no sign of other habitations ... and as I looked at their provisions I divined the reason - if they lived without tillage on the fruits of the ground, they must need be few in number, and live far apart. [77]

"Hope left the two Venuses still on the beach, and sailed out in his boat on the lake down the long winding-like water." [85]

The idyll is broken by a sudden resurgence of the colonial mentality in Hope:

Yet, after all, it was they who had to learn. Their mind in its best phases had little that was superior to humanity. Some happier thoughts - some sweet companionship - some feelings of freedom and pleasure - new perhaps to any inhabitant of my native world; yet of that great body of thought which has arisen from our mechanical and omniverous [sic.] propensities, they knew nothing, and as I afterwards found out, were saved from stupidity and savageness by the long-continuing slowness of their mental emotions, and by their wonderful care of, and kindness to, each other. [77-78]

He promptly teaches them "the mystery of fire" and starts to plot their future subjugation. After all, he and his friends:

had come to find a future home for the growing millions of their native earth, and here all around the tropical zone was a region fitted with everything necessary, while the dim polar regions would serve to exercise all the latent ingenuity of the coming man. [88]

This rather chilling vision is exacerbated by the author's strange habit of switching from first person to third person narration in adjacent chapters. It's tempting to see in this a device for showing the divided nature of his protagonist, simultaneously attracted by and scornful of these gentle inhabitants of the new planet he is exploring. Certainly, at times, his thought processes are described in quite violent terms:

I laughed aloud as one in madness at what I knew not, except that all things jarred and frayed, and roughened all my spirit, and the Venuses sat on without turning a thought or eye towards me or my wild motions. [79]

The author's clumsiness of diction and general lack of narrative sophistication would seem to argue against this conclusion, but one would certainly have to acknowledge the intensely experimental nature of this piece of proto-science fiction. It is as if he is literally trying to invent a new genre as he goes along.

Another interesting aspect of Hope's courting of the Venuses is that it is juxtaposed with chapters describing Weir and Moxton's explorations among the asteroids. This second volume of his work (which must surely have been intended to have a sequel, even though no trace of it has ever been found) ends, in fact, on a literal cliffhanger, as Weir tumbles off the side of a planetoid, plummeting (as it turns out) forever:

Moxton saw him with arms wide-spread falling, falling and turning - good God! Would he never cease to fall? The huge rock fell and struck, and fell again - but Weir [...] out in space. Moxton thought his brain would burst. Would Weir never cease to fall? [102]

These are the last words of his story.

•

What then, is one to make of The Great Romance? Contemporary critics were pretty harsh:

Review of The Great Romance. By the Inhabitant. Vols. I and II. Dunedin: Printed at the Daily Times Office. Otago Daily Times, Issue 5247 (18 February 1882): 1.

This is evidently the work of a young and unpractised writer. It is full of crudities of style and matter which lay it open to criticism on almost every page; but there is something about it a little out of the common way. It exhibits an exuberant fancy, and an adroitness in avoiding obvious difficulties, that redeem it from absolute inanity, though the absurdities of its plan and the impossibilities of its details render it a fair mark for ridicule. The two “volumes” are, in reality, only pamphlets; and, as there is yet more to come, we can only faintly guess what the whole will be. The interest is well sustained so far, and lovers of Jules Verne’s delightful voyages of discovery into the unknown will find amusement for an hour or two in “The Great Romance,” even as far as it has gone. The writer, who takes the name of J. R. [for ‘B’] Hope, goes to sleep in 1950 under the influence of a chemical sleeping-draught of wondrous potency, and wakes up in 2143 in another state of existence. Finding his old friends and his ladylove greatly sublimed and glorified, he is naturally anxious to rise to the same level. He determines to start off with his friends, Weir and Moxton, in an aerial boat which he finds ready to hand, does so, and arrives at the planet Venus, where he is left by his friends, and is beginning his explorations when the second part closes. The descriptions of the voyage are ingenious, though we cannot say that the writer has the wonderful art possessed by Jules Verne of making everything appear quite natural.

[I omit here a long extract from volume 1]

... It is useless to argue about probabilities when the whole plan of the romance is founded on impossibilities, else we should say the writer had a very crude idea of the Magellan clouds, and of the possibility of life outside an atmosphere, and so on. The “Coming Race” and a recent New Zealand work – “Erchomenon” – have familiarized the minds of most readers of this sort of literature to the possibilities of speculation, with electricity and the flying-machine for materials. These books have, however, a foundation of philosophy, and the great defect of the little work before us is that at present it seems to have little but wild fancy to commend it, and no substratum of philosophical ideas on which to build its shadowy superstructure, But, as we have said, there is more to come, and we have no desire to be hypercritical.

The only other contemporary comment laid emphasis solely on the primitive nature of the production, though it did do posterity the considerable service of naming the author for us (whether accurately or not is difficult to say - there seems no obvious reason to doubt the attribution, however):

'An Ashburton Author.’ The Christchurch Star, Issue 4276 (5 January 1882): 3.

AN ASHBURTON AUTHOR. – Mr. Henry Honor, a gentleman resident in Ashburton, has at present in the Press a work of imagination entitled “The Great Romance: by the Inhabitant.” The tale is an account of a perilous voyage amongst the stellar worlds, the voyageurs being three men, and their vessel a sort of half-and-half craft called the “Star Climber.” The first “volume,” a booklet of 55 octavo pages has been issued. It has suffered a good deal at the hands of the printer, whose work is decidedly not productive of a thing of beauty.

The principal modern critic of the story, Dominic Alessio, whose 2008 edition I have hitherto been quoting from, sees it in its contemporary context as:

a promotional piece encouraging emigration. As Clute and Nicholls point out [in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction], because of New Zealand’s distance from Old World centers of power, the colony became ‘a convenient setting for moral and Utopian tales’ … The emphasis on friendly aliens may even be part of a booster strategy intended to assure European readers concerned about rebellious Maori in the post-1860s New Zealand wars climate [xliv-v].

While Alessio is eager to claim that "The Great Romance ... demonstrates that western representations of the Other are often far more complex and ambiguous than Said’s [Orientalism] assumed" [xlvi], he is nevertheless forced to conclude that:

If one deconstructs the story as an alternative ontological history of contact between the Maori and the British over the course of the nineteenth century, one which merely uses the alien-human story as a surrogate for this relationship, then it is not surprising that things still turned out the way they did despite the initial optimism for cooperation that followed in the wake of the signing of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi [xlviii].

Ashburton

For myself, I hope that this post has made clear my sense that a lot of the haunting strangeness we can still feel in - especially - the second, Venusian, part of The Great Romance comes from its strong roots in the local landscape.

Of course I realise that Ashburton in 2019 has little in common with the town that stood here in 1881, but such prominent features as the still spectacular Lake Heron can have changed little in the intervening 140-odd years. It does seem strangely reminiscent of the 'Venuses' lake dwelling, while the basic lines of the town would not appear to have greatly altered either. And is it wrong of me to see something of Hope's "castle" in the extravagant lines of the local post-office?

Lewis Carroll: The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

More to the point, the feeling of intense dislocation which must have prompted the "inhabitant" (or should I say Mr. Henry Honor?) to start composing his interplanetary romance are still strongly in evidence for outside visitors. There seems something inevitable about the fact that a book based on that most puzzling of nineteenth-century poems, Lewis Carroll's immortal Hunting of the Snark (1876), should also have been written here, also after an 140-year gap: David Elliot's Snark: Being a True History of the Expedition That Discovered the Snark and the Jabberwock and Its Tragic Aftermath (2016).

David Elliot: Snark (2016)

The most surprising thing of all, perhaps, is the concerted efforts "the inhabitant" made to circulate his work. Volume One would appear to have been printed at the office of one of the local Ashburton newspapers (though volume Two was farmed out to the presses of the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin). It seems doubtful that a third volume will ever now emerge from the stacks, but if it does I'll certainly be eager to know whether Hope is compelled by the better angels of his nature to leave the poor Venuses in peace - more to the point, whether Weir can ever be rescued from his Lucifer-like fall off the asteroid.

I'll never know, I guess. To be honest, I'm a little surprised that no-one has - as yet - undertaken to write a continuation of the story. Dickens' posthumous mystery story Edwin Drood has been "finished" by numerous other authors. Why not The Great Romance?

The Great Romance (2008)