Most readers encounter Jules Verne as children, boarding a hot-air balloon, descending into the center of the Earth, sailing twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, or racing around the globe in eighty days. For many, these adventures remain childhood memories, their pages yellowing on forgotten bookshelves. But every so often, a reader returns to Verne as an adult and discovers that the stories were never really about machines or monsters. They were about possibility.
One of literature’s most extraordinary coincidences unfolded in 1969. As Apollo 11 prepared for humanity’s first Moon landing, observers noted striking parallels with Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, published 104 years earlier. Verne imagined three travelers launched from Florida on a voyage to the Moon, returning by splashdown in the ocean. Although his spacecraft was propelled by an enormous cannon rather than rockets, the similarities were remarkable enough that many hailed him as a visionary. Even more significantly, generations of rocket pioneers, including Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Wernher von Braun, acknowledged that Verne’s novels helped ignite their fascination with space.
Yet prophecy alone does not explain Verne's enduring appeal. Thousands of speculative writers have imagined the future, but few remain as relevant today as Verne. His genius lay not in predicting inventions, but in recognizing that curiosity itself is the greatest engine ever invented. His novels invite readers to look beyond the horizon, to ask impossible questions, and to imagine a world forever larger than the one they presently inhabit.
Peter Schulman has spent years exploring Jules Verne’s extraordinary life and legacy. More than a biographer, he guides readers into the intellectual world that produced one of literature’s most influential visionaries. In this conversation, we discuss the man behind the adventures, the myths that have accumulated around him, and why, nearly 200 years after his birth, Jules Verne still inspires explorers, scientists, writers, and dreamers alike.
Charles Carlini: Jules Verne is often called the “Father of Science Fiction,” yet many scholars argue that label doesn't quite fit. If you had to introduce him to someone who had never heard of him, how would you describe his true place in literary history?
Peter Schulman: I agree! It is a common misconception to consider him a science fiction writer. He was very prescient and forward-thinking, but all of his purportedly “sci-fi” novels—glamorized in sometimes cheesy film adaptations—were really mostly just scientific novels. He consulted the most advanced scientific resources of his time and simply presented the latest theories and technological ideas. He did write some fantastical novels, such as Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet), about castaways on a comet that had crashed into Earth, but that was also very allegorical. What makes Verne such a captivating writer is his writing itself! It is clear, at times poetic, with powerful, original imagery; witty, unique dialogue; and characters that are endearing and, at times, complicated. He is also a page-turner with depth, along the lines of Alexandre Dumas and some of Victor Hugo’s novels. He is a master craftsman with a truly unique, immutable voice.
CC: Verne seemed to anticipate technologies that did not yet exist. Was he unusually prophetic, or was he simply an exceptional observer of the scientific currents already shaping the nineteenth century?
PS: I think he had an instinctive curiosity that led his writer’s imagination to conjure possibilities in technologies and scientific advances when he conceived of his novels, but he was not truly prophetic. Quite the contrary—what made his novels so extraordinary in scope was just how thoroughly he researched the countries he wrote about, the inventions he conceived, and the mathematical equations his characters came up with. The discoveries that make him so famous and anticipatory actually came straight from the latest scientific information at the time because he devoured and scoured the most rigorous scientific journals of his era. He spent hours and hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale reading, plowing through volumes, and looking up notes and charts. When he was stymied, he consulted scientists he knew who filled his lacunae. Journals such as Le Tour du monde discussed proto-submarines, spacecraft, air travel, and balloon voyages, which he read avidly. I always felt Phileas Fogg embodied all late 19th-century travel innovations combined: ships, trains, balloons. Speed in movement was in the zeitgeist of 19th-century France.
CC: Many readers know Captain Nemo, Phileas Fogg, and Professor Lidenbrock, but few know Jules Verne himself. What aspect of Verne’s personality surprised you most during your research?
PS: Two aspects of Verne’s personality surprised me. First, his remarkable normalcy and steadiness. He was delightfully bourgeois, enjoying the comforts and security of his home in Amiens and trips on his yacht, the Saint-Michel. He seemed to enjoy simple pleasures, perhaps a bit too much, as he became diabetic toward the end of his life and needed to sit in a low chair to consume the vast quantities of food he relished.
Conversely, what is surprising about Verne is the tempestuousness of his inner life. He could be deeply pessimistic about the world, felt unappreciated by the literati of his time, and felt the weight of capitalism, jingoism, and global greed. Some of these themes emerge in his novels, but he often couched them in good cheer and in his characters’ ability to overcome adversity. Politically, he consistently supported the underdog and the oppressed, whether the Quebecois in Canada or the miners in England. At times, he was a voice for the voiceless.
CC: Verne traveled remarkably little compared with the astonishing journeys he described. How did someone who seldom ventured far manage to create such convincing worlds?
PS: In my book, The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern Eccentric (Purdue UP), I discuss the emergence of the “stationary traveler” in 19th-century French fiction. J. K. Huysmans’s eccentric character, Des Esseintes, describes visiting the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris and then returning to the comfort of his townhouse. He was repulsed by the vulgarity of the tourists who, at the time, were embracing the new technology of train travel. He felt he had fully experienced his trip at the train station and saw no need to prolong it.
From a more cheerful perspective, Verne seems to have conjured the wonders of world travel through his love of reading and research. He delighted in learning all he could about the countries he wrote about and shared this newfound knowledge with his readers. Through reading and writing, Verne seems to suggest that we can travel exponentially and in an enriching way. (I now worry that virtual reality might offer a similar experience, but it may not be as satisfying, as it lacks the effort involved in search and discovery. VR can be a spoon-fed experience, without the fulfilling work that research provides.)
In the 18th century, Xavier de Maistre wrote a charming book titled Voyage Around My Room. De Maistre spent 42 days (almost half of Phileas Fogg’s journey) traveling around his room through his imagination, chronicling unexpected joys and marvels. The 17th-century philosopher Pascal also noted that all of humanity’s woes stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room. Many of Verne’s characters, such as Captain Nemo or Michel Ardan, meticulously cling to their inner spaces, even when their vehicles are boundary-breaking. Nemo recreates his magnificent library within the Nautilus’ mobilis in mobili apparatus; Ardan brings his entire wine cellar onto the projectile he uses to circumnavigate the moon.
CC: Modern readers often assume Verne celebrated technological progress without reservation. Did your research reveal a more complicated relationship between innovation, power, and human ambition?
PS: Absolutely! Verne was actually hugely skeptical and cynical regarding technological progress. This became more obvious after his publisher and editor, Hetzel, passed away. Hetzel had been able to rein in Verne’s more pessimistic instincts to make his novels more salable. Verne’s very first novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century, for example, depicted a dystopian Paris of the future governed exclusively by greed and ruthless capitalism. Although critics note Verne’s prescient introduction of a fax-like machine and other futuristic elements, the novel was so dark that Hetzel refused to publish it, and it wasn’t discovered until the late 20th century! Instead, Hetzel published the cheerful Five Weeks in a Balloon, which launched Verne’s career and became an instant bestseller.
Several times in his career, Verne wrote a sequel to an optimistic novel that turned into a scathing attack on modern society. The third sequel to From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Topsy-Turvy, for example, had the original astronauts of the Baltimore Gun Club come out of retirement to use a special cannon to remove the tilt of the Earth’s axis so there would be only one climate all year long. They wanted to do this to exploit and mine the North Pole for maximum profit. Similarly, the sequel to his 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror, Master of the World (published close to his death in 1904), features the inventor Robur, who had cruised the world from the air in his aircraft, the Albatros, suddenly becoming an international terrorist who uses his invention to bomb cities and countries. It is a depressing take on the first part of the novel, echoed in many of Verne’s later works such as Begum's Millions, which juxtaposes a belligerent Germanic military state with a nuclear bomb-like cannon against an overly hygienic Gallic state that, while pacifist, is overly concerned with conquering germs and malady.
In his later novels, inventions often arise from greed or with little regard for the environmental disasters they create. Verne frequently terminates these initiatives with natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, floods, or earthquakes that put an end to the greedy ventures.
CC: Your work brings Verne out of the realm of children’s literature and into serious intellectual history. Why has he been underestimated by literary critics for so long?
PS: In France, I believe he was overlooked for so long due to the snobbery of the French literary canon. He was associated with young adult literature for a considerable time and wasn’t taken seriously by his peers, even in his own era, a fact he deeply resented. This same snobbery, I think, pervaded French academia in the 20th century, prioritizing only “serious” authors, and later, “serious” theoreticians. Only relatively recently has he been accepted and recognized for his importance to society as a whole. For instance, France’s Pleiade editions—considered the ultimate canonizer of writers for publishing the most complete, scholarly editions (so revered in France that they’re printed on Bible paper!)—finally published Verne’s works, and he was included in Baccalaureate exam questions a few years ago. American scholars were the first to embrace him, often seeing him as a maverick less constrained by established norms. I believe critics neglected him because they hadn’t truly read him; once they did, they recognized the marvels in his writing.
CC: Looking at today’s technological revolution, from artificial intelligence to private spaceflight, which developments do you think would have delighted Verne, and which might have deeply concerned him?
PS: I think he would have been completely charmed by space travel. From the Apollo missions to the space shuttle, he would have been entranced. I was just following the French female astronaut Sophie Adenot, who, at just 44, became the first French female astronaut to spacewalk, and I think he would have been very proud of that! I’m pretty sure he would have been skeptical regarding A.I. and social media. As for private spaceflight, he was typically very uneasy with billionaires using their wealth not for societal benefit, but for their own power, ego, whims, or fortunes.
CC: Verne’s novels are filled with wonder, but also with obsession, isolation, and the unintended consequences of discovery. Do these themes make him more relevant today than ever?
PS: Very much so. He was deeply concerned with how “progress” was destroying the environment. Even in his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, he included a foreboding ecological warning about our planet. His message was to protect the Earth and act responsibly, rather than exploit it to oblivion. One of the lovely aspects of Captain Nemo's Nautilus is that its energy, the crew's food, and even their clothing all come from the sea. The Nautilus was completely green before the term even existed! As Kennedy states in Five Weeks in a Balloon: “The time when industry gets a grip of everything and uses it to its own advantage may not be particularly amusing. If men go on inventing machinery they'll end up by being swallowed by their own machines. I've always thought that the last day will be brought about by some colossal boiler heated to three thousand.” In La Jangada, for example, Verne decries the destruction of the rainforest from deforestation and the vanishing of its indigenous people; in The Invasion of the Sea, French colonization in North Africa leads to massive environmental disasters and the subjugation of the colonized. The list goes on and on. Psychologically, Verne also warned us about being consumed by our obsessions. Even a classic hero like Captain Hatteras, whose monomaniacal quest to reach the North Pole leads to the death of many of his crewmen, ends up alone and isolated, dreaming of an unattainable goal. His role models for our time were always those who could master themselves before pursuing their missions and who were generous and kind in their endeavors.
CC: If you could spend one evening in conversation with Jules Verne, what is the one question you would ask him that historians have never been able to answer?
PS: We know a lot about Verne’s writing habits and methodology from his wonderful correspondence with his editor, Hetzel. Together, they crafted his best-selling novels. I would like to ask how he channeled such beautiful, wonderful characters into his writing, even when he himself felt gloomy or hopeless at times. There has always been a Houdini-like quality among his characters, who get out of jams and impossible situations unscathed, and I would like to know that secret!
CC: Nearly every generation discovers Jules Verne anew. What do you hope readers will see in him that previous generations may have overlooked?
PS: Cheer and optimism are qualities I feel are dissipating in today's global society. Verne’s best novels focus on transcending limits, where nothing is impossible, and where goodness—a genuine love of our fellow humans—prevails over darkness. I recently gave a talk on Verne as part of a maritime exhibit. I told the organizer that I wanted to discuss his sea adventures, and a few weeks before my talk, she asked, “So, who is this Jules Verne guy again? Did he write 500 Leagues Under the Ocean?” That made me realize young readers might not automatically discover him today. For one, film may have overtaken reading in many instances, with now iconic, almost archetypal space adventures (I think of Star Trek in my generation, but there are modern iterations). Popular series like Harry Potter may also have largely replaced Verne. The fond memories I have of sinking into a big armchair as a young boy with an omnibus edition of Jules Verne’s adventures might not be replicated in today's youth, but you never know. I rediscovered Verne as a graduate student at Columbia University. I was stuck on my Ph.D. thesis but lived right above a used bookstore. One day, I saw a French paperback edition of Around the World in Eighty Days for 25 cents. I picked it up, went into the library to read it, and became entranced, swept up in the pure delight of reading and the optimistic energy, and then I was unblocked. I hope readers see that joyful breaking of barriers in him today.
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