Hurriedly re-reading a lot of Jules Verne has reminded me where I got a lot of my youthful sci-fi enthusiasm. Sure, I went onto reading other sci-fi things, but I learned about Jules Verne when I was maybe seven, maybe even earlier. And he's got the attitude nailed, right away: science and engineering, in the hands of determined men (it's always men) like Captain Nemo or the architects of the Columbiad, can do anything. Phileas Fogg isn't himself a scientist or an engineer but his confidence in the world-encompassing power of trains and steam-engines and timetables, and all the other commonplace technological marvels of the late nineteenth century C.E., amounts to a virtual superpower. Merely to be part of the system, and have total faith in it, is to have a share in the conquest of Nature.
Doesn't that sound familiar? It's roughly the same guiding principle that O'Brien cites near the end of George Orwell's 1984. To be one with the intricate mechanisms of the Party is to share in its immortality. IngSoc has conquered not merely Oceania but reality, and you can have a share of the same power. You can float off the ground like a soap-bubble if you want to (if the Party's okay with it.) Or is that too outrageous an analogy?
I make Jules Verne sound like a villain. And I guess he is, just a little bit. He's fully committed to the European imperial project—as far as he's concerned it's amazing. I suppose you can attempt to read a whiff of social commentary in the fact that Captain Nemo regards the Sea as his conquest to be harvested at will. (He kills an endangered sea-otter—the text takes care to mention that it's endangered. He kills an albatross.) I'd like to believe that Verne's just a bit ambivalent about it all. Generally, though, he seems quite enthusiastic about the Western colonialist practice of rending open the bowels of the Earth in search of treasure and greatness. The government of Florida is prepared to sacrifice their entire state to Barbicane's lunar cannon ("let it bust up!") as if the land were theirs to sacrifice.
Funny writer, though. Verne can still make me smile. ~Χαρά