Closing the Circle: Jules Verne’s Invasion of the Sea

      As the first title to be published in Wesleyan University Press’s new book series Early Classics of Science Fiction, this volume of Jules Verne’s Invasion of the Sea is historically significant for many reasons. It is the first English translation of this important work,¹ and the first complete, unabridged, and fully illustrated scholarly edition of any late Verne novel ever to appear in print. Its original French counterpart, L’Invasion de la mer, was the last of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires to be published before the author’s death in 1905² and, as such, the last novel that can be attributed to Verne’s hand alone.³ In many ways, both thematically and narratologically, Invasion of the Sea completes Jules Verne’s fictional odyssey where it began. And it closes the circle on nearly a half-century of “extraordinary” contributions to world literature that, rightly or wrongly, have immortalized him as the “Father of Science Fiction.”⁴

      Publishing History

      L’Invasion de la mer (1905, Invasion of the Sea) is one of four late novels by Jules Verne that have previously never been translated into English. The other untranslated titles from Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires—a series comprising over sixty novels published from 1863 to 1919—include Le Superbe Orénoque (1898, The Mighty Orinoco), Les Frères Kip (1902, The Kip Brothers), and Bourses de voyage (1903, Travel Scholarships). Unlike the recent “discovery” of his early unpublished manuscript of Paris au XXe siècle (1994, Paris in the Twentieth Century), these late works by Verne were never “lost.” Following their original French publication in the familiar octavo red-and-gold Hetzel editions, they soon appeared in translation in dozens of other languages, from Spanish to Slovak.⁵ Yet, to date, they have never been available in English. Why?

      The reasons for this perplexing lacuna have less to do with the quality of the novels themselves than with certain trends in the reading and publishing market of the late 1890s and early 1900s. In one sense, Verne was the victim of his own success. With the unparalleled triumph of his early best-selling novels—Cinq semaines en ballon (1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon), Voyage au centre de la terre (1864, Journey to the Center of the Earth), De la terre à la lune and Autour de la lune (1865 and 1870, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon), Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea), and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873, Around the World in Eighty Days)—Verne achieved what no writer before him had succeeded in doing: he popularized a new brand of literature that mixed fiction with real science. This new literary genre, a forerunner of what would become known as “scientifiction” and then as “science fiction” in America during the 1920s, might be accurately described as “scientifically didactic Industrial Age epic” or, more simply (as the author himself chose to label it), le roman scientifique—the “scientific novel.” With the worldwide success of his early romans scientifiques, Verne established a strong tradition for this innovative literary form, finally providing it with a socially acceptable institutional “landing point” and ideological model.⁶ And soon after, spurred on by the public’s increasing interest in contemporary discoveries in science and technology, this new genre became all the rage. During the last years of the nineteenth century, a veritable host of “Verne school” writers such as Paul d’Ivoi, Louis Boussenard, Henry de Graffigny, Georges Le Faure, and Maurice Champagne inundated the French market with their fictional spin-offs. Their immediate popularity—in addition to the growing demand for the speculative works of other French writers such as Camille Flammarion, André Laurie, Villiers de l’Ile-Adam, Capitaine Danrit, Albert Robida, and especially J.-H. Rosny Aîné—soon began to chip away at Verne’s domestic monopoly on these types of narratives.⁷ Similarly, in Great Britain and America, the English translations of Verne’s oeuvre found itself in competition with imaginative works by a host of anglophone authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Percy Greg, Robert Cromie, James De Mille, George Griffith, Edward Bellamy, Mark Twain, Jack London, and Frank Stockton, as well as with scores of inventive (and cheaply produced) “dime-novels” in series such as The Frank Reade Library.⁸ Finally, the rapidly growing popularity of Verne’s primary rival, H. G. Wells, had a major impact on the demand for Verne’s fiction.

      Undoubtedly, the huge success of H. G. Wells’s “scientific romances” most adversely affected the sales of Verne’s later works, especially among anglophone readers. After the publication of his 1895 and 1898 masterpieces, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, Wells was promptly acclaimed “the English Jules Verne”⁹ (i.e., the “new and improved” version). And his highly conjectural fictions soon began to dominate the Anglo-American marketplace. For fin-de-siècle readers at the dawn of a new millennium, Verne’s “hard science” and heavily didactic plots came to be viewed as stodgy and old-fashioned. In contrast, Wells’s scientific romances seemed more imaginative, more cosmic in scope, and more provocative in their futuristic extrapolations. In a word, Verne’s unique and once-successful formula of “scientific fiction” was progressively losing favor to its younger and more fanciful cousin, “science fiction.”¹⁰

      English-language book publishers during the 1890s and early 1900s were unquestionably aware of and very sensitive to these market trends. Even in France, the demand for Verne’s books had been slowly but inexorably diminishing during the final decade of his life, as he continued to churn out two or three novels per year. In contrast to the continuously sold-out print runs of thirty thousand to fifty thousand copies per title for Verne’s earlier works between 1863 and 1880 (Le Tour du monde en 80 jours alone topped a hundred thousand), the first-edition sales of his later novels, from 1880 to his death in 1905, averaged only seven thousand to ten