This volume is a fresh examination of the works of Jules Verne, the pioneering and enduringly popular science fiction writer. Essays study Verne’s various novels—including Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Included essays offer analyses of literary responses to Verne’s work, assessments of film adaptations of his novels and discussions of steampunk, the Verne-inspired science fiction subgenre that has influenced writers like Philip Jose Farmer, Caleb Carr and Adam Roberts.

Gary Westfahl, a professor emeritus at the University of La Verne, California, has authored, edited, or co-edited 31 books about science fiction and fantasy, and hundreds of articles and reviews. In 2003, he received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship.

Edited by Gary Westfahl
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 323
Bibliographic Info: 15 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2023
pISBN: 978-1-4766-8773-5
eISBN: 978-1-4766-4868-2
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments v
Introduction
Gary Westfahl 1
I. The Writings of Jules Verne
Humor in the Works of Jules Verne
Arthur B. Evans 7
Imperialism and the Sublime of the Enlightenment in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires
Bed Paudyal 19
Residual Space: Verne’s Mysterious Island
­ Marie-HélÈne Huet 27
The Return to the Frontier in the Extraordinary Voyage: Verne’s The Mysterious Island and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
John Rieder 36
Verne Among the Punks, or “It’s Not All Just a Victorian Clockwork”
Howard V. Hendrix 51
Winter Lights: Disaster, Interpretation, and Jules Verne’s Polar Novels
­Marie-HélÈne Huet 61
Postwar Verne Pastiches and Surrealism
Nicolas Saucy 92
II. Responses to Verne’s Works
“Comrade Jules Verne vs. the Sharks of Imperialism” in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Crimson Island
Ekaterina Yudina 111
When Less Becomes More: Adapting Around the World in Eighty Days
Kieran O’Driscoll 116
There Are No Chicken Dinosaurs on The Mysterious Island: Or, Why the Film Adaptations of Jules Verne’s Novel Are Mostly Terrible
Terry Harpold 140
Have Verne—Will Travel: When the Three Stooges and Paladin Met Phileas Fogg
Gary Westfahl 156
Halley’s “More Ample Creation”: Divine Utility in Hollow Earth Theory and Fiction
Peter W. Sinnema 166
Professor Lidenbrock vs. the Mole Men: The Hollow Earth After Verne
Terry Harpold 175
III. Steampunk
Finding Nemo: Verne’s Antihero as Original Steampunk
Mike Perschon 185
Steamjunk: Four Works by Philip José Farmer, the Deservedly Unacknowledged Father of Steampunk
Gary Westfahl 203
Decadent Science, Steampunk Effects, and Caleb Carr a Century Later
Donald M. Hassler 213
A Study in Sherlock, or Constructing Holmes in the ­­Twenty-First Century
Stephen W. Potts 222
Verne’s Depths: A Cosmogony of Possibilities
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro 242
If Jules Verne Were Alive Today… Reflections on Steampunk and Technothrillers
Gary Westfahl 253
Steampunk: The Authors Speak
James P. Blaylock, Jonathan Green, Stephen Hunt, and Paul Di Filippo 261
A Bibliography of the Works of Jules Verne 269
A Bibliography of Secondary Sources on Jules Verne 275
A Bibliography of Secondary Sources on Steampunk Science Fiction 292
About the Contributors 297
Index 301