The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin Page A
Authors: Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin
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Leagues Under the Sea is Pierre Arronax, a more conventional scientist than Nemo, who has set out to investigate the great mystery and, in company with his servant and a harpooner, has fallen into the hands of Captain Nemo. We are never allowed to witness Nemo’s thought directly. He is an aloof and enigmatic personage, his true motives revealed to us only in occasional outbursts of passion.
Arronax and his companions are not sufficiently Romantic themselves to fully appreciate the wild and nearly transcendent nature of Nemo and his undersea realm. The only transcendence that Arronax is capable of apprehending is the super-scientific submarine. Arronax is astonished by the Nautilus, and well he might be. It is Verne’s most evolved vehicle of super-science, capable of going anywhere under the ocean.
The Nautilus is Verne’s best-remembered imaginary invention, cited as an example of accurate prediction by those like Hugo Gernsback who have most forcefully presented the idea that science fiction is fiction about science. In his editorial in the first issue of Amazing Stories, Gernsback would write: “Take the fantastic submarine of Jules Verne’s most famous story, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ for instance. He predicted the present-day submarine almost down to the last bolt!” 72
In fact, however, as a true vehicle of transcendence, the Nautilus is capable of being interpreted as both plausible and mysterious. In the last years before he died, Verne gave several interviews to British journalists in which he made revealing remarks on the nature of the Nautilus which have it both ways.
In the first interview, in 1903, he came down on the side of the mystery of the submarine. He said:
The Italians had invented submarine boats sixty years before I created Nemo and his boat. There is no connection between my boat and those now existing. These latter are worked by mechanical means. My hero, Nemo, being a misanthropist, and wishing to have nothing to do with the land, gets his motive force, electricity, from the sea. There is scientific basis for that, for the sea contains stores of electric force, just as the earth does. But how to get at this force has never been discovered, and so I have invented nothing. 73
Here Verne gives credit for the bolts of his submarine to the Italians. He takes credit only for imagining (in a properly scientific manner) that the sea is a great electric battery from which the Nautilus draws power. Since no one has discovered how to do this, he, Verne, is an imaginist and not an inventor.
In the second interview, given in 1904, Verne placed his weight on the other foot. In the course of trying to distinguish his work from that of H.G. Wells, Verne spoke again of the Nautilus, by way of example, and this time emphasized its plausibility rather than its mystery:
Take, for instance, the case of the Nautilus. This, when carefully considered, is a submarine mechanism about which there is nothing extraordinary, nor beyond the bounds of actual scientific knowledge. It rises or sinks by perfectly feasible and well-known processes, the details of its guidance and propulsion are perfectly rational and comprehensible. Its motive force is no secret: the only point at which I have called in the aid of the imagination is in the application of this force, and here I have purposely left a blank for the reader to form his own conclusions, a mere technical hiatus, as it were, quite capable of being filled in by a highly-trained and thoroughly practical mind. 74
That is transcendence for you—an attainable leap that remains unattained, a goal for highly trained and thoroughly practical minds to strain after vainly.
In fact, the power source of the Nautilus, as the actual pages of the story make clear, is transcendent power passing under the plausible name of “electricity,” as so much transcendence did during the Nineteenth Century. The unveiling of the motive power of the submarine in
Arronax and his companions are not sufficiently Romantic themselves to fully appreciate the wild and nearly transcendent nature of Nemo and his undersea realm. The only transcendence that Arronax is capable of apprehending is the super-scientific submarine. Arronax is astonished by the Nautilus, and well he might be. It is Verne’s most evolved vehicle of super-science, capable of going anywhere under the ocean.
The Nautilus is Verne’s best-remembered imaginary invention, cited as an example of accurate prediction by those like Hugo Gernsback who have most forcefully presented the idea that science fiction is fiction about science. In his editorial in the first issue of Amazing Stories, Gernsback would write: “Take the fantastic submarine of Jules Verne’s most famous story, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ for instance. He predicted the present-day submarine almost down to the last bolt!” 72
In fact, however, as a true vehicle of transcendence, the Nautilus is capable of being interpreted as both plausible and mysterious. In the last years before he died, Verne gave several interviews to British journalists in which he made revealing remarks on the nature of the Nautilus which have it both ways.
In the first interview, in 1903, he came down on the side of the mystery of the submarine. He said:
The Italians had invented submarine boats sixty years before I created Nemo and his boat. There is no connection between my boat and those now existing. These latter are worked by mechanical means. My hero, Nemo, being a misanthropist, and wishing to have nothing to do with the land, gets his motive force, electricity, from the sea. There is scientific basis for that, for the sea contains stores of electric force, just as the earth does. But how to get at this force has never been discovered, and so I have invented nothing. 73
Here Verne gives credit for the bolts of his submarine to the Italians. He takes credit only for imagining (in a properly scientific manner) that the sea is a great electric battery from which the Nautilus draws power. Since no one has discovered how to do this, he, Verne, is an imaginist and not an inventor.
In the second interview, given in 1904, Verne placed his weight on the other foot. In the course of trying to distinguish his work from that of H.G. Wells, Verne spoke again of the Nautilus, by way of example, and this time emphasized its plausibility rather than its mystery:
Take, for instance, the case of the Nautilus. This, when carefully considered, is a submarine mechanism about which there is nothing extraordinary, nor beyond the bounds of actual scientific knowledge. It rises or sinks by perfectly feasible and well-known processes, the details of its guidance and propulsion are perfectly rational and comprehensible. Its motive force is no secret: the only point at which I have called in the aid of the imagination is in the application of this force, and here I have purposely left a blank for the reader to form his own conclusions, a mere technical hiatus, as it were, quite capable of being filled in by a highly-trained and thoroughly practical mind. 74
That is transcendence for you—an attainable leap that remains unattained, a goal for highly trained and thoroughly practical minds to strain after vainly.
In fact, the power source of the Nautilus, as the actual pages of the story make clear, is transcendent power passing under the plausible name of “electricity,” as so much transcendence did during the Nineteenth Century. The unveiling of the motive power of the submarine in
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