The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (11 page)

Joe Smith smiled. “I’m
an old man, sir. I want you to publish the truth, and damn those in power. They
wouldn’t harm a citizen nearing ninety-six, would they?”

I felt my throat
constrict. His faith in the honour of the ruling regime was at once terribly
innocent and dangerously optimistic.

“I wouldn’t publish
anything while you might suffer the consequences,” I said.

Joe poured me another
whisky and we talked for a further hour.

“The other evening,” he
said, “I was attempting to list the benefits that might have come from the war.
I could think only of the improved transportation system!”

I smiled. “There have
been medical advances, too. The cure of tuberculosis has saved many a civilian
life, as well as those of soldiers returning from the war.”

I turned my attention to
his bookshelves, stocked with the leather-bound volumes of Dickens and
Trollope.

He noticed my interest. “I
like a good novel, sir. Have you by any chance written a . . . ?”

I interrupted. “I have
many a good idea,” I said, “but hardly time to commit them to paper. Perhaps
one day, when the war is over . . .”

I noticed Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury on his shelf, among other volumes. “You enjoy poetry too?”

“It is one of the
consolations of old age,” Joe said. “My favourites are the War Poets, Owen,
Graves, Sassoon, all dead now, alas.” He indicated a dozen back numbers of the
Adelphi.”
I enjoyed your poems, too, until the government closed down the magazine.”

“The dabbling of an
amateur,” I said, “though I rather think I will be writing more verse at the
front.”

Joe Smith looked
shocked. “You’ve been called up?”

“I volunteered. I join
my regiment in the morning.” I paused, and felt an explanation was due. “People
often mistake patriotism for nationalism, Joe. I love England, but hate what
she is becoming. I believe that we are facing a terrible evil in the new Germany
that’s emerging from the old order, even if the war was originally based upon a
lie. Mussolini is making pro-German noises, and the German minister of Foreign
Affairs is an evil schemer called Hitler who’ll soon be in power. As reluctant
as I am to pitch in my lot with the blimps in charge of this benighted land,
Joe, I feel I must do my little bit.”

I finished my drink,
consulted my watch, and made my excuses. “I have an early start . . .”

We stood and Joe showed
me to the door. “It has been an honour talking to you, Mr Orwell,” he said.

“The honour has been
mine, Joe.”

As I stepped out into
the freezing night, Joe Smith quoted, “‘There may not always be scientists, but
there will always be poets’ . . .”

I paused. “I don’t recognize the line.”

“From
Six Weeks in a Balloon,
sir.”

“Dr Fergusson wrote that?” I asked, surprised.

Joe Smith laughed. “The
line is Jules Verne’s,” he said.

We shook hands, and I
took my leave of the worthy Joe.

It was only a mile to
the cheap hotel I used when in London, and I elected to walk. Turning my collar
up against the wind, and murmuring to myself,
“There will always be poets .
. .”
I squared my shoulders and set off into the dark and freezing night.

One of the great
discoveries in recent years was of a lost novel by Jules Verne. Not a
latter-day, unpublished one, but an early one.
Paris
au XX
^e
Siècle
had been completed in 1863, so must have been his
second novel, but was rejected by Hetzel partly because he believed the
predictions would not be believed. Verne buried the manuscript in a safe and
there it remained until discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. Here Verne
really had let his imagination take free rein and his vision of the future is
remarkably prescient. Perhaps it was because the work was rejected that Verne
subsequently kept his stories within the close parameter of the plausible and
as a consequence whilst we had more believable adventures we lost the true
technological predictions. The book is as much a travelogue of the future as
Verne’s later books became travelogues of the Earth in the present. As such it
leaves itself open for satire, as the following story shows.

[Editor’s Note: With the
discovery of Verne’s early “lost” novel of 1863,
Paris au XX
^e
siècle, came
the simultaneous discovery of a hitherto unknown sequel,
judged to have been written in 1904, toward the end of the writer’s life and
career. The event aroused little excitement in Vernian circles
simply because, whereas
Paris . . .
was an intact manuscript of some 200
pages (complete with margin notes by Verve’s regular editor Hetzel), the
manuscript of the belated sequel was burned — in all likelihood by Verne’s son
Michel — and survives only as a set of charred fragments. The title page itself
has been lost but we may reasonably infer from the content that the novel is
called
Londres au XXI
^e
siècle (London in the Twenty-First
Century).
Reinforcing this supposition is the fact that the story features
the same protagonist as
Paris . . . ,
Michel Jérome Dufrénoy, still a
poet but now an older and much sadder and wiser man than the self-martyring
young firebrand of the previous novel. We present here the full extant text of
Londres
. . . ,
commending it to readers not only for its many startlingly accurate
prognostications, so typical of Verne, but for its brevity, so untypical of
Verne.]

pp. 3-5

/”M Dufrénoy,” said Mr
Smith the publisher, “I have run a thorough analysis of your verse collection
on my totalizer and have been served with a statistical conclusion that backs
to the hilt my professional instincts. The book has been subjected to every
form of critical and linguistic computation available. Every word, every
phrase, every rhyme, has been scrutinized by the machine and checked against
the preferred standards. It is as if your poetry has been looked over by a
thousand of the most median public minds, appraised by a thousand pairs of eyes
that recognize what is ‘popular’, what will sell.”

“And the result?” said
Dufrénoy, although the publisher’s tone of voice and down-turned lips had
already given him his answer.

“Alas, the sales
projections for the book are minimal. Indeed, the totalizer predicts that not
only will we sell less than a dozen copies but those dozen copies will almost
instantly find their way into second-hand bookshops, from where half of them
will be sold again and half thrown away after sitting untouched on the shelves
for a year. In effect, we will sell a negative number of copies, as it is
predicted that the half-dozen volumes purchased from the secondhand shops will
be bought by the very people who passed them on to the second-hand shops in the
first place, forgetting they used to own this selfsame book a short while
earlier. You see, the totalizer’s assessment of your poetry is that it neither
captures the imagination nor lodges in the memory. Therefore, with regret,
monsieur, I must tell you that Smith and Daughters respectfully decline to be
your publisher.”

“But,” expostulated
Dufrénoy, “you are saying that because your machine informs you my poetry will
not sell, you are not prepared to attempt to sell it!?”

“Why does this come as a
surprise to you?” replied Smith with a calm gesture. “You know that we in
publishing are in a business, much as everyone is in a business these days.
Who, in 2005,
can-not
afford to be in a business? Thus we employ
statistical projection methods to enable us to judge what books we should and
shouldn’t put out. Our margins for error are fine. We cannot financially afford
the least slipup.”

“So you will publish
only something which you know beforehand people will buy?”

“Is this so strange?”

“But you base your
judgements on a mechanized distillation of public taste.”

“Exactly!” said Smith,
rubbing his hands with satisfaction. “The totalizer is programmed to reflect
nothing but the essence of the average man’s and woman’s literary likes, that
which the busy person will choose to flick through while speeding to the office
by pneumotube or the holidaymaker will idly read while lazing beneath the
sun-like arc lights at an indoor vacation lido. Which is not to say, M
Dufrénoy, that your poetry is bad. On the contrary, in my opinion it is
excellent. Beautiful, limpid, elegant, exquisitely expressed, and above all
original. ‘Original’, however, is what we cannot afford. ‘Original’ is the last
thing anyone needs. ‘Original’, to put it finely, is not a marketable
commodity.”

Dufrénoy was stunned,
although in truth he had not expected any other response. It was, after all,
his one hundred and fifteenth rejection by a publisher, and by now he was
becoming/

pp. 17-18

/his twelve-year-old
grandson Michael had come to visit, transported for the weekend from his home
on the Kent marshes where he lived in one of the towns magnetically suspended
above the floodplain, the “hovervilles” as they were known. Michael was a
reluctant guest at his grandfather’s since the apartment was mean and dingy and
situated near the base of a seventy-storey dwelling complex in run-down Muswell
Hill. Little sunlight penetrated down through the urban canyons to the
lower-level abodes, hence illumination down there had to be provided by
sulphur-gas streetlamps which burned throughout the day as well as the night,
shedding an unsteady bronze glow and a Hadean odour. Michael was accustomed to
skies that reached from horizon to horizon and air that was constantly
freshened by sea-borne breezes. The city, and especially his grandfather’s part
of it, was to him a fusty, almost subterranean place, and his infrequent visits
were conducted out of a sense of duty and with a greater than usual
pre-adolescent surliness which even Dufrénoy’s most strenuous efforts at
inculcating jollity could never dispel.

For the most part the
boy sat and watched entertainments on Dufrénoy’s videophote set, a particular
favourite of his being a song-competition presentation in which contestants
with little or no musical talent vied to deliver the blandest possible
rendition of some popular standard, their goal being to cause the least trouble
to the ear of the listener and thus gain greater approbation than their rivals.
Another of Michael’s preferred pastimes was a battery-powered toy, the Game
Wallet, manufactured by the Worthington Novelty Company of Newcastle. This
bauble consisted of a steel box with an inset window in which, by means of an
ingenious development of Brownian motion, tens of thousands of phosphorescent
vapour particles were manipulated electrostatically to form images. The images,
controlled by magnetic cards purchased separately, presented the player with
various games and puzzles to be solved, from relatively straightforward old
standbys such as Hangman and Noughts and Crosses to more abstruse fare such as
Moon Cannon Target Practice and Transglobal Travel Time Challenge.

Dufrénoy would look on
with something close to despair as his grandson played with his Game Wallet
often for hours at a stretch, mesmerised by the fizzing luminous patterns,
thumbs manipulating the box’s brass control keys with blurring dextrous speed.
How alien the boy seemed to him, a creature not merely from a different
generation but from a different planet as it were! What did Michael know of
books? Of literature, of culture? Very little, it appeared. Such things were
not required learning at school any more, where the subjects of science and economics
were pushed to the fore, to the detriment of all others. It pained Dufrénoy to
think that all the/

pp. 49-50

/and from there the
protest march wound southward along Whitehall toward the gates of Downing
Street, where it halted and the protestors set up a chant, brandishing placards
and stamping their feet. They called for the Prime Minister to emerge from his
residence, which eventually he did, capitulating to their demands with a
bleary, sheepish grin on his face. Dufrénoy could scarcely believe it. He didn’t
know which was more astounding: that the Prime Minister had the nerve to face
members of the electorate after the heinous crimes he had committed, or that
the protestors were not baying for the man’s blood but rather
objecting
to
his decision, announced earlier in the day, that he intended to resign. He had
said that morning at a press conference that he considered his position
untenable in the light of the revelation that he had slaughtered his wife and
children in cold blood (as proved by the fact that several eyewitnesses had
come forward to testify that they had personally seen him standing over the
bodies, knife in hand, bathed in gore). Moreover, the Prime Minister had said,
it did not behoove the nation’s representative on the world stage to be a
convicted rapist and the recipient of several sizeable bribes from corporations
involved in shady dealings, as revealed in an exposé in one of the newspapers
yesterday. Indeed, anyone who, like him, appeared in covertly-taken
photographs, some of which showed him cavorting with prostitutes of both sexes
and others of which depicted him belabouring a member of His Majesty’s
Opposition with a crowbar in a backroom at the House of Commons, was not the
slightest bit deserving of high office.