Notas del episodio
When Apollo 11 headed home in 1969, Neil Armstrong used a television broadcast to honor a French author who had written a century earlier about a spacecraft launching from Florida and splashing down in the Pacific. This episode explores the life behind that legacy: Jules Verne, the second most translated author in history, born in 1828 on an island in the Loire at Nantes, surrounded by merchant ships and raised on a schoolteacher's story of a husband lost at sea who would surely sail home. We separate the myths, including the invented tale of an 11-year-old sneaking aboard a ship to buy a coral necklace, from the real conflict between a boy hungry for exploration and a father who demanded he become a lawyer.
The conversation follows Verne to Paris during the 1848 revolution, through his heartbreaks over Caroline and Rose Herminie, his friendship with Alexandre Dumas, his double life as a stockbroker writing at five in the morning, and his thousands of research index cards. We then examine his fraught relationship with publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who launched the Voyages Extraordinaires but rewrote Captain Nemo's backstory and locked Paris in the 20th Century in a safe. Later chapters cover the shooting by his nephew Gaston, the darker novels that followed, his son Michel's unauthorized rewrites, and the butchered English translations that reduced him to a children's author for a century.
- The facial paralysis attributed to stress that was actually inflammation compressing his facial nerve
- How Five Weeks in a Balloon was rewritten in two weeks and became a runaway success
- Why Hetzel feared alienating Russian readers with Nemo's original Polish revenge story
- How cheap translators gutted Verne's science and why the 1960s and 70s reevaluation restored his reputation
- Verne's insistence that he invented nothing, and how his method became the blueprint for steampunk