Tonight is the Manly Book Club, a neighborhood book club I started for an excuse to hangout and talk ideas with the guys in my neck of the woods. We’re talking about Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. While it’s not the most interesting book we’ve read, reading it has certainly been an interesting look through a keyhole at how the world, and fiction, has changed over the last one hundred and fifty years.
Published in 1864, it’s the third of fifty-four (!) in Verne’s series of “extraordinary voyages,” which includes Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Today’s reader might find it slow, arduous, and painfully melodramatic at points…which, to be honest, is probably how the journey was. Since, writing styles have changed, but this was the 1860s, and Verne was at that time the apex of science fiction.
Slow and arduous though the Journey seems sometimes (it takes half of the book just to get to the volcano down into the Earth), it’s still a creative and enjoyable foray of imagination and speculative science. Verne does make stuff up, but his characters weld math and science (as understood then) as much as they do the ropes and lamps they carry on their subterranean adventure. It’s an interesting contrast to a lot of today’s novels, weighted as much towards social justice as the fantastic, if not more, and not one that suffers in the contrast.
(It does seem odd that the main character is affianced to his cousin, though…what’s with that?)
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Extraordinary Voyages #3
Science Fiction
1864
160
What a stunning discovery: an old, coded note that actually contains directions for reaching the Earth’s very core! And once he finds it, renowned geologist Professor Liedenbrock can’t resist setting out with his 16-year-old nephew to go where only one man has gone before. Jules Verne takes young readers on one of the most incredible journeys ever imagined, from Iceland’s frozen tundra far down into fantastic underground prehistoric worlds and back up again through the fires of an erupting volcano.
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