Hi there and welcome back to Hugos There 2.0 and this is another author deep dive this time about Jules Verne which and that's the way I pronounce it because until just a couple of years ago I had no idea,
it never crossed my mind that he had written originally in a language other than English and no, in fact his name is closer to Jules Verne and that's because he was French and both my guests will be able to pronounce the name more accurately because they both speak French so that's it I said guests, I have two guests for this podcast, I have Emmanuel from the Stellar Podcast Lafayette, we're here, hi Emmanuel, hi, good to have you and I also have Haley from the equally stellar
podcast Hugo Girl, hi Haley, hey how you doing? Yeah it's good to finally have you, I was before we were recording I was like I've never had Haley on solo and then I realized still haven't so so down the road sometime we'll do that I have to say when I was originally talking about this I mentioned to Emmanuel I said I feel like Americans don't know that Jules Verne is French and so I put up a poll on Twitter and I was not encouraged by the results it turns out it was just me 84% of respondents
knew he was French so maybe it's a little embarrassing but maybe they cheated they went to Google first yeah yeah yeah so I think I have a handle on how Emmanuel came to speak French but Haley what's your
story? I was in college and I didn't know what I was going to be doing or studying but I knew that I was going to get a minor in French like I studied it in high school and I loved it and then I just kept taking classes and then by my junior year they were like well if you take another five extra classes you can have a double major so I majored in English and French literature so
nice so did you read some via? We did not read any Jules Verne we read a lot of things mainly I read things from the 19th century so okay yeah which Jules Verne is from the 19th century but it was more like the clat it was like you go yeah okay nice and I do want to make sure to to refer people
over to Lafayette Ware here because you recently did an episode if people want to know more about more detail about exactly who the man was Emmanuel did a great job on that recently yes on my podcast Lafayette Ware here which as many of you guessed now know by now is a French
history podcast oriented towards the American public and my last episode of July 24 was on Jules Verne so it's really a kind of biography you know going through his whole life not only the books we're gonna talk about here but from his beginnings to the end his life in in Nantes in Paris and in
Amir after that we can touch on some of those elements but if you want to complete overview you can go to my latest episode yeah excellent and I think it makes a certain sense to bring any of that in that you know relates to what he was writing so I guess that would probably be oh well I guess
before before then hey anything new with you girl um no just hanging out we took a month off which we hadn't done in five years and so yeah that was really fun actually yeah yeah I talked with Amy about that so yeah I'm glad we had some time off we mentioned it in the episode that we dropped
today but I've been reading a lot of uh world worked I get really into like world work two every couple years and so I've been reading about um the marine expeditionary forces in the Pacific on Guadalcanal so that's where my head's at my dad was so into that he had bookshelves and bookshelves
and I wish that I had ever taken that up the closest I've come as I watched the Pacific yeah and that is a launching point same with band of brothers when I got really into like the Normandy campaign and all that stuff yeah yeah and and when I was a kid you know we had the the mini series
war and remember and I guess the winds of war and war and remembrance and yeah coming to work yeah yeah yeah yeah good stuff my first historic research was in World War II and my first website was a big French website on World War II when I was like 15 16 years old so that was also like my
entry into getting seriously into history so I know I geek about World War II too I mean it's a major event right so it makes sense it's yeah and if you want more about World War II and the manual's expertise on that you can check out the technique to read to your reader episode on slaughterhouse
five or our Hugo's their episode on black out and all clear okay so let's go ahead and start you know maybe a manual without spoiling your episode like a brief you know back of the envelope I guess inside flap bio of of Jules Verne yeah so as I said it was from Nalt which is in Western France
unlike on the Atlantic almost on the Atlantic coast and he is so he's born in 1828 I believe and so he's really and he dies in 1905 so he's we are 19th century writer and he's the son of a lawyer so he's in any first to this law he's not supposed to become a writer he's supposed to do like that
to work in his office but Jules Verne is anything but a lawyer I mean he's very he works a lot he's very smart but he wants to create and that shows very when he's very young he conflicts with this dad a lot and then he will move to Paris to study law but he will meet artists and writer and
playwrights and all these people and he's basically in Paris in mid 19th century of course he's not gonna do what is that ask of him he's gonna become a writer it's gonna be a bit tough for the first few years but then in the 1860s he's gonna be discovered if you'll buy an editor call
etzel and he's gonna start publishing his most famous books like five weeks in a balloon I think is the first novel that gets recognition if you will and then he will have the book we're gonna talk about today from the earth to the moon and a few years later he's gonna have his masterpiece
20,000 leagues under the seas then he's gonna go on for a few decades like that he's gonna be snubbed a bit I would say in his life by the literary community just like many science fiction author still are you know and he's gonna be a huge influence on everybody after him
people often compare to hg wells and but they forget the Verne was active 40 years before is he was and we also took a lot from him which is you know to be expected and also a Verne is an influence on modern literature like if you take the Tentan story the these big adventures they
clearly flow from the kind of story that Verne talks about because it's not only science fiction it's basically big adventures they can be based on prediction but often they're based on as we'll talk about science and when he was living is basically extrapolating from that yeah and he's really
to me an image of 19th century big scientific advances and positivism that is gonna be very strong throughout his whole life nice his background reminds me I so when I went to college you know I went to study engineering but I ended up hanging out with a theater people and the music people
and getting involved in music theater and choir and things like that but I somehow resisted the urge to switch to be an art major so yeah I did the same thing I graduated from law school and practice for a little bit but then I became a professional writer so right and you're you're doing
a lot more writing these days right yeah well I write for a company so like I'm not like yeah yeah writing creative I mean you do some fandom stuff too though right yeah I write for the nerds of a feather I do movie reviews so but nothing terribly creative but I do like to write
well they're very well written oh thank you yeah indeed so a manual in school growing up did you did you get exposed to a lot of children not a lot but some I would say okay the book that pretty much every young French kid will read is around the world in 80 days because it's a fun story
it's an easy read it's very short and the concept is fun just basically basically on a wager this guy named Phil Asfax goes around the world in 1870 something and he has to make it in 80 days which at the time is a remarkable feat you know you don't have plans you know you almost have no
trains except within you know metropolitan metropolitan France people stuff like that you know it's so it is a fitting it's a big adventure so it talks about other countries and at the time to most people it's a complete discovery you know people just don't know about those other countries so we
did read about we did read that book but I would say even though we don't read that much when at school per se verne is a huge persona in France if it's part of the French ethos in some way everybody knows of him he has treats and places all over the place you know is it is just like you
know I don't know take Edgar Allan Pope in America everybody knows him even if they never read him right right hey what about you in terms of your like what's your history with with Verne yeah so I read I had a bunch of like the great children's illustrated classics and I read
yeah yeah around the world in 80 days and it was like definitely a bridge but you know it was that's the you know it's 200 pages I better or whatever um and then I read a 19th century novel that can't be abridged or should everything everything but mobi dick um okay
okay okay yeah um and then I read 20,000 leagues under the sea in high school as well and hadn't revisited him since since this summer actually so but it's good um one of my first memories of jules verne actually is in uh back to the future part three yeah dimensions it to Clara and I was
like yeah obviously I remember that it seemed very well yeah I that may have been the first I knew of the author other than so for me I had never read any many jules verne at all um I was only exposed to it through film intelligence so I had seen the the Kirk Douglas 20,000 leagues under the
sea I had seen the Pierce Brosnan around the world in 80 days I've never seen the David Niven one um which is more classic I think yeah well there's a new one with David Tennant um that's on PBS it's like an eight part mini series they kind of changed it up because it's kind of problematic
okay I saw the Steve Cougan one as well yeah yeah I don't know 10 10 15 years ago yeah the uh the 1956 around the world eight days one best picture which is wild wow so I have to I'll have to check that one out at some point and put it on my list but yeah this is this is a new basically
a new author for me so I was appreciate that so Emmanuel if you were to tell someone where to start would you tell them to start with around the world maybe days it can be a good start because it's uh for me I would say it's a light story it's easy to go in it there's a lot of humor in it
it's you know it's quite funny and I would say something like the um from the earth to the moon could be good for an American because it happens in America the story is in America so maybe you could read it and it's right after the civil war so it does have some connection to American history
so that could be a good a good one too I would not start with um 2000 leaks because it's a denser book it's more complicated and it's the one of those when he enumerates a lot you know when you have those biologists who geek out about species and stuff and it's relevant but if if
does the one you start with it could be a bit of putting I wanted to to bounce this off of you if you think that that jules verne was sort of like the proto hard science fiction author because he he really tries to ground things in reality and when when he has a moment to pull on a thread he
just keeps on pulling and and yeah there's a catalog of fish and 20,000 things under the sea there's basically an entire chapter all about the moon and and how we know you know using parallax how we know how far away it is he is and he's he can also have the neo-legresteis and of the time
because there is clearly an attempt to educate people it's part of his I would say it's part of his contract almost with his editor that he has to have the scientific base story so they both entertain and also educate and all the stuff he talks about is really at the at the top of scientific
knowledge of the time he was he did his research very very well we can laugh of course after some stuff you know but it's easy to laugh 130 years after that he wrote it and we actually went there you know which was on the case we can talk about how we handle GeForce in his novel but as we all
know by the way from the third back to the future very scientifically accurate we cannot go faster than 88 miles per hour with locomotive so he didn't have any actual trial to to see what the effect of GeForce under human body yes yeah hailey any comment about the hard science fiction
thing yeah that's one of the things that I wrote down I would not recommend anybody starting with from the rest of the moon it is like pure physics I got real bored real quick it is funny at points but yeah it is just I mean and it's super smart like I even like what there's one point he's like
this is the exit velocity like 12,000 meters per second I was like I'm gonna check that it's like he's right so I mean so that's really cool but it's just basically it's just like it's like the really hard parts of Neil Stevenson books like I guess like I get it woo this is
just like a physics lesson right right yeah and and credit where it's due you know he really did come close to all the the exit velocities and the transit time to reach the moon I'm not quite sure where he was going with the exact you know the zenith and and Paragee calculation I guess I guess
for something that can't adjust its trajectory you have to be a lot more exact where with with yeah man spaceflight you know we can we can go out of the earth's atmosphere and do an insertion burn right to actually head toward the moon so we can and and use retro rockets and that kind
of stuff to correct the course but you really have to know you got it right if you're just going to aim a big gun at the moon and shoot I do want kind of want to start with from the earth to the moon because I feel like that that's the science fiction fan choice right and Emmanuel like you mentioned
it's set in America and it is so American because unfortunately because it starts off at the gun club right it starts off with with the members of the gun club who are responsible for making big cannons and things like that lamenting the fact that the civil war is over and there's not really
a prospect for another good dust up anytime soon and so what are they going to do and somebody's like what if we shoot the moon yeah it's funny that his depiction of memory cans is really basically that you are brave entrepreneurial hardworking open-minded but also billi-cars and
trigger happy basically which is so funny because France of the 19th century wasn't the most peaceful place no no no no no we we had like five changes of government in the year so and the French are very aggressive in billi-cars in their own history so yeah it's
perspective at the time so another thing to kind of talk about I mean anytime you talk about science fiction or writing in the past right is he looking at their worldviews and seeing oh okay this is you know around the world in eight days pretty Eurocentric right there's there's some stuff where
you're like we could we could do better than that description of you know folks in Asia nowadays but he also it seems like Vern admires lots of different groups of people because because with around the world in 80 days you know he I can't tell if he's insulting English people or
complimenting them on how cool Philly's Fog is and how how you know unperturbed he is that's the nicest way you could put to describe him yeah it's it's always a bit caricatureal I think he has to at some point because as I said at the time most people don't really know about these
other people and you know when you read about for example when these when he depicts Italians or Spaniards they're basically backwards and really over religious you know so it takes the caricature of the time which is very common I would say most French authors were of course
say we the French are better than these guys right right you know but everyone knows that Americans are like this yeah exactly so there's a fair element of that I would say it if you read his whole corpus it gets nuanced at times not always that obvious and that aggressive but yeah he was of course
an integral part of the the preconceived ideas ideas of the time yeah yeah it kind of reminds me of if you've ever read democracy in America by Alex the Tuckville like he wouldn't like travel around America for years and if you read that book you're still like wow us Americans have not
changed very much and you know having having the gun club with people that have missing limbs from wars and shooting guns and they're just like give me more guns like it's still true 150 years later yeah especially so when we see it from an outside perspective I mean I'm not that far I mean Montreal but from or set of the border what some stuff that happens in the States is just fibergasting yeah yeah I can feel you sideying us from from up there and it reminds me of the the onion post that
is always posted every time there's a mass shooting in the US that says nothing can be done about this as the only country where this regularly happens it's true but despite all this he does present Americans have people that that do try to solve this insolable problem how to get to the
moon and he does point out a few times only the Americans could do it only you have this spirit in this capacity and to to make such a endeavour true but halfway through the book of course the main hero is right and what I did like is that he comes in very late in the story this he does
he comes in very late and he's like hey you whole design you know what I put a hatch in it I'm gonna go into that shell to the moon what oh I'm almost there by the way yeah yeah exactly and I don't know maybe maybe it's a little surprising that he put America forth as the you know
where the ingenuity is because England was still a gigantic empire at this point it was starting to to win right and and kind of by the time World War II was over it was you know basically gone you have a hard time finding a Frenchman praising England that makes sense yeah
and which at the time you know the those two countries have been at war for like five centuries on and off and even though there's been a peace period at that at that time tensions were coming back it's it's a bit complicated but you know Americans French like Americans more than English
almost all the time you know so he's not he's no exception in that regard plus the Americans did have that reputation of being very courageous you know it's the time of the frontier and all that stuff so it does and your country still not that well defined in their European's minds so
it is very exotic to them yeah so I think that's part of the reason like the the English are enemies but also they're common you know we know we know the English we've known them for a thousand years and we each each other for a thousand years so no not that interesting but
Americans were very interesting to the French people at the time yeah and he was right like England and France would never go on to explore the moon they would never have huge space programs that's just the fact yeah in the end he was right I I do want to mention to folks I don't think
that I mentioned this while we're recording that from the earth to the moon is it's more than half of a book as Emmanuel said when we were before we were recording you know there is a sequel to it which I don't how much longer after did it come out if it came out right after like a year or two
after and can I spoil it so people yeah from the earth to the moon it does end on something of a cliffhair yeah basically the so spoil times everybody basically they manage to get people in a shell they shoot it with a huge cannon and as Haley explained you have all the engineering and
physics behind it before in the book so they yes I have a very good idea of what's going on and but they actually miss so instead of flanting of the moon they're going to orbit around it which is actually a good thing because you know what happens in the second book very broadly is that
they turn around the moon for some time and they get hit by an asteroid which changes their trajectory they come back to earth thanks to that because at some point they leave the gravity of the moon and they get grabbed by the gravity of the earth which is fairly accurate I would say
and they land in the ocean I don't remember which one but the image the the drawings they did at the time the illustration of that capsule in the ocean with those teams of boats going around to extricate the astronauts from it it just it looks like an apolar capsule it's secret when you
think about it and to me I can't imagine that those guys who designed that capsule didn't have some julienne story in their minds yeah I'm sure you know that he he was an inspiration to maybe kids who later became engineers or scientists what have you yeah yeah I mean it you've seen that
story a bunch of times right why do you think we use why do you think we ever had flip phones right because of communicators on Star Trek you know why do electric cars sound like electric cars from movies because they have to have a speaker in them so that they make some noise and the
engineers were like well it should sound like an electric car then yeah so a funny mention that so it was the Pacific and I read some Wikipedia today during their return journey from the moon the crew of Apollo 11 made reference to Jules Verne's book during a TV broadcast the missions commander
Neil Armstrong said a hundred years ago Jules Verne wrote a book about a boy to the moon his spaceship Columbia stick took off from Florida and land in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the moon it seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew
as the modern day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet earth so and the influence on US adventures doesn't stop there for example in 2000 leagues under the sea the famous submarine is called the Notilus and the first US nuclear submarine was called the Notilus in honor to Jules Verne
yeah so there is a back-in-forth between Jules Verne and the United States and I would say broadly Western culture more than people have often known but everybody knows the Notilus even everybody knows Captain Nemo is part of our culture on both sides of the Atlantic
yeah even thinking of finding Nemo right yeah it's not a coincidence I want to back up for a second so the the previous zoomed out episode that they just posted at the beginning of August is about translated science fiction and of course all of Jules Verne's works were translated from French into
English and I think my my guest mentioned that some of them were really bad translations so there there would be someone would be thinking oh Americans don't care about this and so just like eliminate an entire subplot are you aware of any of the travails of the translation I do know that
many of them were translated at the time because Verne was very popular outside of France as he was writing okay and I don't know I don't think they had that high-quality standards back in the 1934 translating work basically want to make it available as quickly as possible and a story and
Vein point never read the English version of his own stories okay so if they kept that version going for long that could be part of the explanation hmm could be like they got somebody who who said that he read French kind of like Brad Pitt in Inglorious Bastard spoke Italian from journal because
when you read Vein and Haley can comment on that when you read Vein in the original French he's a very plain writer he's very clear very very clear you know there is no way you can misunderstand him he's not a Hugo or a Duma who plays with words a lot no he's not like that he's very straightforward
this kind of a like Azimov I was thinking like he's like Azimov like he explains everything lays it out everything has a reason yeah maybe not as bland as Azimov it does try to cover things a bit in his characters and not as though but still he is very straightforward so I think it could
be very translated perfectly because he doesn't play with the French language as much as a victory go with okay yeah it's not poetic it's it's it's it's a matter of fact I think he relies more on his plots than like his character development or his like twists but yeah I think it's it's I
actually thought about breaking it out and reading some French but all the science and from the earth to moon I think would have been a challenge for me like I don't like to read science texts in English let alone French so I guess maybe not as many things to get lost in translation because
of not trying to you know because that's one of the things right and when if there's ways to to do puns for instance to work in one language but not another right and so when you translate that you have to figure out how to how to render it yeah I don't think there's a single pun in
these books yeah no not even the fan year one like 80 day around the world in 80 days it I think it can be translated perfectly because there is none even the puns the few that are there are very straightforward they're not as I said it's not poetic he doesn't play with the language
so so this is I had a question about from the earth to the moon because the the president of the gun club is named in paid barbacane and I've never heard such a name and I wondered is that is it a joke in French is it pig Latin you know I was never able to figure it out I thought it was I thought it was very de Kenzie and just like MP like imp imperial war like and then barbacane like barbarous so yeah that works okay I hadn't thought of it in in like thinking about Dickens characters
and and that kind of thing where yeah they there were some great names and Dickens and I don't know that he read a lot of English literature he was a huge fan of a Pope for example and you so he I think he was very aware of how anglofones represented themselves in literature so that could be
an explanation of that but it doesn't make any funny thing in French it just how a French man would imagine a president of such and such an association be named yeah I think if he was writing today it would be the similar version would be like shock mcdanger or something
just like like uber masculine I don't know right right Johnny square jaw yeah yes um I did want to ask because in one in one of the big lists Haley in new from the earth to the moon there's a big list of exotic foods in america when and when the entire basically
entire united states comes to watch the launch yeah and some of them are definitely killed by the launch um it will just he kind of yada yada's that yeah but he presents stuffed monkey as a southern delicacy and uh you know I know it land isn't exactly the deep south but but but it's the monkey
and there are no native monkey species in the united states no no I think he was just taking a taking the piss as the vertish would say yeah you just this fried monkey maybe but stuffed monkey right there we go you just destroyed my hopes Haley I was figuring next time I went
down south I could discover something fried well I always think of chilled monkey brains from indiana Jones so yeah yeah happy memories yeah yeah very very respectful depiction of of indian Indian food okay anyhow uh so why don't why don't we move on and let's talk about
around the world in 80 days I mean we don't have to dwell super long on any of these because I think they're you know we we mentioned there's a number of adaptations of around the world in 80 days and I thought it was amusing that um you know my only reference for it really was that I completely
forgot the Steve Cougan movie until we started recording but the the Pierce Brosnan one was a television miniseries oh yeah I just assumed that it was a pretty straight adaptation but there's a lot of differences you know things that are in common are the you know the Indian princess and
and pass part to the the French servant and for this fog obviously and the the law man trying to hunt him down but some of the modes of where he gets from one place to another definitely change I think they do that to make it more interesting because like there there is a lot of train and
boat and I think mixing it up a little bit makes it more fun hmm well I mean it is interesting though that they they get on the train and the train only takes them so far and well now you have to to travel another 40 miles to catch the next next train I was reading about the more recent one
with David Tennant and it's it's it's very modern with like you know politically more appropriate sensibilities and so they turn fix into a woman and she accompanies them kind of like Nellie Bly a journalist they it appears to give her the entire Indian queen subplot which I think
is for the best and just you know they just add more diversity to it but I think it's interesting that the the story keeps living on just we want to change bits but keep the overall theme so yeah Emmanuel were these novels serialized or were they published in novel horn I would say
this one I think was serialized many of them were somewhere released directly as novels but often they were serialized in actually have the name in the magazine of education and recreation so just by the name of the magazine you figure you know the the point of it and funny thing about
the adaptations of 80 I wonder about in the 80 days even during Versa Verne's life it was adapted in place and often by himself or he was part of the production if you are in during those plays you would have big changes sometimes because it was just not practical to try to represent this or
that event but also because Verne understood perfectly the difference between a play in a novel and that you want to show basically the same idea but represented differently and it was perfectly fine with that he started actually as a playwright when he first started writing so he was very
aware of the differences between the original novel and adaptation and you can tell that to Colin I was going to say and he was wearing his now dead to Colin no I mean Ray Bradbury was similar and because he wrote a lot for the stage as well and he often changed things drastically
I wonder if like all of the different forms of transportation it's like a 19th century fast and the furious it's just like man there's like a boat there's an elephant there's a steamship like if you were just like excited to hear about all these different types of modern conveyances that
they might never see so well he is all these stories to me have a common thread is that they show human achievement they show what we can do or what we could do in the to them near future and it's all in my mind it's all part of that very 19th century we have thinking that French philosopher name
Auguste Kant called positivism basically we're advancing progressing the human race as a whole is advancing because to them if you look at somebody living in France in 1870 and you compare them to 1770 it's then night like it's not it's as modernized so fast where if you were to compare 1770
to 1670 it's almost the same you know so I hear of stagnate all the centuries before the progress is very slow but in the 19th century the progress was huge and not only in France but of course there have been franchises the French perspective so to him humanity is going very fast
and advancing progressing you see medicine advances is seeing engineering achievements I mean at the time you know it's crazy like you have Louis Pasteur who perhaps make vaccines come along you have technological achievement that were completely unbelievable maybe 20 years before
trains are starting to go everywhere so imagine living in such a world what you see advancement in such a bright light you make it part of your story and that's something he clearly puts into history with many different forms either by going on the moon or by traveling
around the world or by going under the seas or going to the center of the earth all these books try to represent some aspect of that positive progress I like it I mentioned that around the world in the 80 days and places is definitely kind of Eurocentric and the epitomize probably most
when paspartue becomes separated from fog right because he makes the boat and fog does not and he arrives in Japan and basically thinks to himself I can make a living busking for a couple of weeks until until fog shows up because you know these Japanese could not fail
to appreciate good European singing he would only be so wrong I was thinking about this and one of the notes I wrote down is why is it so fun to watch unbridled wealth move mountains because like right he's like I'm you know tear your ship apart start burning but I don't care like here's
one million it's just so fun to watch somebody who's that rich just like been the world to his will yeah and you know in in this book you know not to spoil too much but you know he essentially doesn't really make any money on the bet right because he spends his entire fortune in order to
to make the trip he does come out with a wife who proposes to him which I thought was nice and it's something that to us French is very British he did this whole wager for nothing for the sport right and that's a perspective I mean it's a very it's a caricature but that's the idea
that a Frenchman would have of a English high society member you know he would do anything on a bet on a whim right and that's something you'll find in those stories that you'll have those national elements here we have an English gentleman in voyage to the center of the earth we
journey to the center of the earth in English I believe we have a German mineralogist in from your treatment we have those Americans in totally thousands of indices we have a French professor and he was always tried to put those elements of each country's what he believes is part of
their cultures and you know as you may know since last Friday with the opening ceremony the French give you quite provocative so expect some discoveries that was so good anything else to to talk about about around the world later days I mean you know it is very what the word
parapetetic rate from one place to another it's fun yeah yeah yeah and it definitely reads like a serialized novel where where you can you can just pick it up and go you know it doesn't have the previously on you know kind of thing that you get sometimes in serialized stuff like I think of
some lovecraft where like the first 25% of any new chapter is recapping what was in the previous one and perhaps that's edited around when when things are compiled into novels but but yeah it's fun and the fog you know is not presented as in really any kind of negative light you know he talks
about how he he plays cards and wins money but then he just donates it to charity right he's he's not really interested in expanding his own wealth and so yeah it's very neutral it's just like this is a weird dude he's got a thing that he likes he's very into his routine
van character stand to be nerds and to to not care about wealth that's also come and thread they usually care about the adventure or the mission what have you but wealth you you can see it doesn't appreciate characters who want to achieve wealth or fortune or glory for for his sake of his
wealth always always something higher in his stories hmm all right maybe 20,000 leads under the sea talk about that for a little bit I feel like those those are they're three good works to kind of introduce somebody to to the author no I mean not not that I'm an authority on that I've read
those three and that's all I will say that horrible okay I will say that I have a really hard time saying 20,000 leads I I've been saying 2,000 leads under the sea for several months it's the kind of title that carry flows better in French vermilieu souri mail it just rolls of the tongue a lot
easier than 20,000 leads under the sea you feel like you're reciting something yeah and it's I thought it was under the sea and and it is in English for a lot of ways but then the French one translate sometimes to its seas which we don't say seas very often we say I think I think it could
have just set under the ocean but yeah it's very apt though because he he definitely describes that's true that's true in many of the different seas right all the way in Indian ocean in the Mediterranean you know Pacific yeah Atlantic it's got it's got big Frankenstein's monster energy in
terms of like it's not Frankenstein it's this right right right well you could argue that it's Submarine is a kind of Frankenstein is a character in itself right yeah and like I saw the movie on television when I was when I was a kid and so basically all that I remembered was being kind of
bored until the squid showed up and then that was awesome and so so I didn't really know much about the actual plot and and and I really enjoyed the way the novel starts and I was I didn't know exactly what was happening when it talked about the ships being rammed by something I thought oh this
is the squid we've already met the squid you know and then when they go out there and they start harpooning it and I'm like metal oh okay I think I think I know what this is now and so so it kind of surprised me and I really enjoyed the book I think I would really not like it on a reread
because of all the the the ways that I don't appreciate hard science fiction where yes I'm I'm glad that you did all that research and all that homework and you spilled it all out of the page for me and one time I can usually get through that maybe not with the Mars books but with with the
Martian and Jurassic Park and most most Michael Craton yeah I you know I can appreciate that one time through and then when I reread it I'm just annoyed it's because like it's partly because I think once you learn it you it kind of gets spoiled like okay so that's how he makes the potatoes
and the Martian to go yeah so there's there's no alumnus surprise left so yeah yeah I I will say the most unbelievable thing in here for me is that people were eating on the onboard the Nautilus and Mustuk seafood for anything but seafood that's not a thing people who don't like
seafood don't like any seafood and and to us it tastes it all tastes the same so and what it tastes like is seafood even even seaweed like seaweed chips terribly fishy yeah for for those of us who can eat fish and it's a bummer yeah just think about how good their cholesterol was though
for all right well but but of course you know the the Canadian and the and the Frenchman were especially the Canadian was constantly wanting to get on land and shoot something with hooves you know I've got to eat meat yeah yeah yeah the Netherlands character is a funny one yeah in particular
you have kind of a comic relief especially he's like he's duo with conseil I don't know how they translated his name in English it's just conseil conseil the same okay I guess it'd be like if your name was advice exactly that's what it means yeah and he is a good advisor yeah he's like
Passpart 2 if Passpart 2 was in the military he's just like yes that is shit together he's loyal to a fault and has absolutely no personality yeah willing to lay down his life for for his master yeah yeah whereas netland is always unhappy about something and he wants to hit something
yeah and you have the professor in the middle trying to find reasons somewhere around that but the sense of all in the professor is very interesting I find when he discovers the notice in all those species and you can feel like he's giggling out completely you know which is our sentiment I can
share yeah he's having the time of his life even though he's technically a prisoner for like the rest of his life and he's just like well at least the views great right right exactly he's a prisoner within the most advanced state logical achievement of humanity so he's like me I'll take it
mm-hmm he's like well it could be worse yeah yeah one thing that I admire about about Jules Fern is he he really does write in that that professorial kind of kind of voice where he's going to tell you some things and if you're someone who's in the know about science at all
you're going to be like I about what about and then then he'll answer that up to a certain point right up to the level of his knowledge um you know he'll he'll he'll say something like water water is the solution to the of course crushing acceleration that someone would experience on being launched
out of a gun may I deyada yada is it and and you go okay that's fine that's that's where he crosses over into the speculative part of it um but but he does a good job of kind of laying that groundwork and you're like well okay how are you going to deal with the buildup of carbon dioxide
in here and he talks about it and then of course it becomes a crucial plot point later on and he does a better job of it than I think azimab does because sometimes azimab is just like and then I press my anti gravity button and that's how it works like right at least he lays down you know
the groundwork for yes I I applied hand-wavium and it was all better that's science yeah yep yeah and the the thing he always tried to have this balance between scientific facts and engineering and actual adventure and story and plot moving forward which is not easy to achieve
uh honestly that's it's really easy to get either very boring or as ali said just press a button for himself and normal discussion he he he he struggled that's something during my research I did on my own episode at first he struggled to find that balance and his editor was a lot of help at
the beginning to find it to say because he was putting less scientific elements in it at the very beginning like his short stories and stuff and his editors and I put more of it to the point that people will learn a lot from those and remember at the time though this stuff is not taught at school
most people don't actually go to school at the time so it's it's very good in that in that way and something that you can't find really with any authors that I found from that era it's very unique it's very modern and we mentioned before that he was snubbed by lots of the literature
community at the time some people actually loved him one of them was Alex on Juma the famous author wrote the three masquiteers for example and but Alex on Juma was himself snubbed by many people because his grandfather was black yeah so he had black ancestry and of course the French society
being what it is many racists and people accused him of being a descendant uh you know of they called him an negro to his face yeah you know and he would play with that in one of the stories he some people say oh you must know everything about apes being who you are you know this kind of
stuff you know very wow very bad any answered yes or my family and starts were no my family ends where you begin or something like that you reverse the thing against him and because he was like son Juma you know you don't try to attack a guy like that right right but he had a hard yeah
exactly and you know he helped Véron he loved his work but Véron never made it into the academy française which is like the elite core of the French writers and I have an anecdote about that Véron tried a few times but there was only 40 seats I think and you need to wait until one dies
uh to have a seat available they called it immortals because of that and he never made it and his nephew who was let's say had mental issues severe mental issues so that's the son of his brother Paul who he was very close to one day his nephew decided he wanted to help his uncle get into the
academy so what he did he waited for him and his house after he went to a social club and he shoot him in the leg um basically to have sympathy on his uncle and he said it I did this for you so you could get into the academy française and of course it didn't work poor guy the poor
nephew Gaston I think was his name uh spend the rest of his days in an asylum died in the 1930s and Véron limped for the rest of his life oh that's that's a weird story but it's it's true yeah I mean the science was so solid on the attempt too you know yeah also like him
him writing in the 1850s and 60s like that's just a stack time for French literature so lots of competition yeah yeah you got to you got to pack the academy expand the academy you know you have people like Hugo Mouba some all these people are from that year
are you it's it's one of the most prolific period of French literature as as he said yeah captain Nimo is definitely an interesting character and like he's so alienated from from the world of humanity right and I know in one way I kind of want to reread it and do a character
study of him and really really dig into like what where did that and the book does tell you right it's he's mourning and and his mourning has has turned him into this underwater in cell kind of and radicalized him really in a lot of ways but uh I had always thought of captain Nimo
as a good guy and and so then reading this I'm like oh this is not a nice man this is no yeah very flawed he is he's one of the world's first eco terrorist yeah yeah kiana is but you can see it vean also explains this story he's a suffering man is a brilliant man
and he's also presenting another book um the mystery silent well we mean we meet him and that's when we learn he is actually Indian so it's one of those big characters who are not Europeans and that's something that at the time could be shocking yeah especially given what you were talking
about about about you know racism in the society oh yeah totally and I will I'm certain if you are to ask most Frenchmen in 1880 what do you think of Indians other savages they would not go beyond that you know and sometimes in vean's book people like in the pacific or I have are presented as
savages as the word they use um so having one being one of those quote-unquote savages being a extreme brilliant man that actually outsmarted many Europeans is quite something I would say yeah that that makes me kind of interested back in around the world in 80 days you know you have
this pairing of an Indian woman and an English man and not of course that that kind of thing was unheard of there there has been race mixing for a long time it was largely due to rape where it's not presented that way in around the world in 80 days but I'd be curious what sort of
adversity you know that couple would face in England of the time or if they would I don't I don't know I mean yeah in the 19th century England and France are more like than different despite their personality differences yeah yeah yeah those don't forget those were colonial countries so they had
lots of back and forth so in the French were especially used to having colonial people coming to the metropole coming to France I think it was more common than in England in part because of the proximity you know lots of people came from North Africa to France which is just across the
Mediterranean and actually at the time of there and you know it although van was anti colonialist and he was anti slavery he recognized this is he recognized this as a fact you know you just have this crossover between between the two and it was part of his stories in his world so it was not
uncommon it's even in 1885 to see black people in in Paris because because of the colonies hmm anything else you want to talk about about 20,000 things under the sea it's it's a it is a good adventure and it is definitely a a meteor book than the other two yeah I would say if you I love
all things aquatic I just got my scuba certification this summer so this was blast to read and I think one thing that maybe might appeal to us less than someone reading this in 1880 for example is like I've seen so many nature documentaries where I've seen things that humans didn't look at for
all of history and so I think even though he describes them well like I've seen these in high deaf so like I think we're we're spoiled basically yeah but the adventures in it are fantastic the actions are actually very good yeah yeah action scenes are rich tremendous yeah so you
live underwater hunt is beautiful and the maelstrom at the end and all that stuff you know it's very compelling very well written to be honest but so let's talk about some some other titles I mean I feel like these are ones that people everybody knows about right and maybe journey to the
center of the earth as well are there are there any other kind of off the beaten path things Hayley have you written have you read anything from Verne that was rarer these are the only three that I've read so okay if you want something different you can try michelle's drug of its history set in
terrestriarsia and you're basically following a courier a man this man michelle's drug of is a courier I think working for the czar Alexander natural which one maybe the first anyway and he so you for so so that's not at all speculative fiction it's we have just a story set
in another country in a tree did a lot of those stories that were not speculative at all they were just based abroad there is always some exotic elements in it there is something like the children of the cap of captain grant which is your friend captain julvian was a himself a sailor he loved
everything aquatic just like Hayley so lots of his stories involve boats and traveling on boats and and the seas and oceans and what else could you could be interesting so I mean he he wrote like 80 books so you know I'm sure you could find a few that would be to your taste and I would
recommend the ones I would say that he wrote in his first 15 years of writing because the ones that John after is in his little later life are very dark actually not out of them but some of them are very dark he actually invents a character with basically the mad scientist we events a device
that could end the world basically a nuclear bomb you know he is before Einstein was a five year old at the time you know so he he invents a lot of dark stuff because he had those very dark experiences in his life I mentioned being shot by this nephew but that's the actually the least of
it he had lots of trouble with his own son he he was snubbed he had some issues and his health was declining so all this made made this very bright van into a darker van and himself just so we can talk about him about his own character even though you have those stories that are
very open very adventures himself he was a very hard man in his own life he was very strict he was tougher on his own boy than his dad what was with him which is funny when you think about it because he basically rebuilt against his dad and when his own son did the same he could not take it
yeah so he was a hard man on many levels and it shows in his later stories interesting hey I just reminded myself that for most of my life when I thought of 20,000 leagues under the sea and this is probably why I truncated to 2000 is because I don't know what a league is
and and so I pictured that as depth not distance traveled and and it was reading it this time I thought okay it's definitely the distance that they traveled under the sea yeah and when you read that something when I read it I figured oh that must be tough for Americans because all the references
for length are they're all in the old French way like the the leagues and all that stuff that even to modern French readers would make no sense because we use the metric system and even though the metric system system was law at the time people used their old system for years like just like
here in Canada we have the metric system everybody tells there are weight in pounds in size in feet and inches never tells them in metric in France they do but not here so that's an example and it was the same for them but what I do find very interesting with Véron is honestly the legacy
of of it all the very long lasting legacy I would say I mean how many kids became engineers or scientists because of him yeah that's something not many authors can can claim honestly it's it's quite great breathtaking it was part of the whole movement of that 19th century going going
into the 20th were science and technology clearly took a part in our lives that never that never did before but is part of the good aspect of it if you will good aspect of it you know I always think about those those NASA guys I'm sure they all read the Gilles always or they know of it in part of that scientific spirit that they find very admirable on many ways yeah it's easy to
imagine uh mr. e-fell reading this you know when he's a young man and I mean like inspired to do hard physics so yeah yeah actually it was contemporary so maybe read it doesn't adults mm-hmm yeah and I think you know in terms of one of the places of science fiction in society and
the good thing that it it does is kind of encourage people to think speculative because there's always this tendency when you look at the history of science there's a tendency to come to a point and think we've discovered everything and it takes some effort to push through into the next revolution
and that's you know that's where the next discoveries come from and where we're you know you end up getting to the moon um and you end up you end up you end up doing discovering the Higgs boson right because because people started thinking more speculatively about things and understanding
everything that they can understand and you know we're kind of getting to one of those points again where we feel like what we've you know we found the Higgs and now what is there left to discover right and we'll see what happens leave it to the French to make a nice revolution out of anything and it's interesting you said that because when you look at the history of literature before then especially in France some authors already touched the idea of going to the stars or to the moon
uh there is this author I think I evoked it last year which you said uh called Cira Norde Bergerac not the character the author of that name who wrote a story of going to the moon in a rocket ship yeah in the 17th century so those people had ideas that would actually come true down the line um
Voltaire wrote a story uh that happens in the stars you have a Saturnian coming to earth and that the story goes Mikko Mikko so those ideas were clearly around with all the discoveries in the science that uh that was happening at the time and even when there was no way of understanding
of knowing how we could make something like that happen but they could see it would happen at some point so they had this vision they had this perspective they had this perspicacity of saying you know what it's gonna take time yes but we'll get there we just have to keep pushing and imagining
and that's something that we often lack uh this imagination that those authors had and that's something that could be very inspiring to many people yeah yeah well you know you have um the debates about science fiction right should it should it be forward looking and positive and
you end up with the you know the sad puppies and the rabid puppies stuff right they we we want the science fiction that we had when we were kids you know that that that was positive and talked about all this stuff and didn't didn't get into social issues and the problem is you know the science
fiction can kind of help correct society and and so there there's a place for for all of it and I like a good you know throwback story it was fun fun reading these and and and kind of soaking in that that kind of positivism of it and it's good to do that now and then but you know it's good
to take a dour look as well sometimes all right so if you were to assign any further reading for for Haley or for me since since our our tally is up to three where would you send us uh for your next reading I mean do uh did you read the journey to the center of the earth no I haven't
I haven't read that one I have heard it's the journey part way to the center of the earth but that's a surprise surprise it is funny it is and I wonder because here is the this you have this German mineralologist and his nephew trying to find the center of the earth and of course
they discussed the theories of his nephew's persecuted the basically dog and a melt because it's so hot down there and he says no anyway they go and they have a big adventure and there's a lot of interaction between the two which are quite funny and there's a whole part where basically
this discover a world under the earth if you will and it's very bright and very careful and very hollow hollow earth kind of thing like in the monsterverse movies yeah and it's uh so it is I would say it's one of those I would recommend because it's lots of fun there is less description
and uh listing than in uh 2000 leagues so it's a bit of it's a bit easier it's a bit shorter too uh 2000 leagues is bigger than most of his novels most of his novels would say 300-400 pages ish uh 2000 leagues is more than 600 uh range so it's a bit heavier tar was it was it really that long
I have an ebook and I don't do pages I do like time left in the book so I yeah me too so I had no idea how long was I don't took me a long time to read but my paper back is about 600 years 600 pages so damn that explains that yeah I did most of it on audio so it said it was a 13 hour book so that's that's fairly long oh nice yeah I have never listened to a complete audio book I can't concentrate I I'll lose it and then have to go back lose it to go back so
hey Emmanuel you're kind of similar on that right you don't usually care for audio books no on a reread yes I will but on a first read it's not now I don't it just doesn't stick in my mind as well plus to me reading with a book in my hand
is just a pleasure it's something that's very soothing to me very relaxing just sitting with the book I actually like the the object of the book you know yeah and I love listening to podcasts including yours Haley and like it true and you know this I love to to have those interactions
or to learn about something I listen to lots of history podcasts for example but something creative something of fiction I have to have it imagined in my mind and that's something I cannot do if somebody else's voice is doing it for me yeah to me is the tremendous so to worry to
age zero and not judging people I enjoyed in that form but to me it's just it's a layer between me and the story that I that prevents me from enjoying it as much yeah I think it's a rare audiobook that sticks with me the same way and an i read does every every now and then there's
something that's that is so well done that it really really works for me I just had a flash of another story you could read that is very nice it's called rebuhr le conquérant au rebuhr or obur the conqueror this one is about flying machines and it's a direct inspiration for the
Japanese anime movie the I cast on the sky I don't know if you know it it's it's a deeply movie it's a great movie but you see the machines in that movie and you read the julien story is the same machines basically you have those balloons with these Elise propellers
the name in the properties thank you with propellers and they look like boats with balloons and with ropes suspended and those propellers and they fly around and so at the time it was very you know original and it's a it's a bit of an adventure story of course yeah and so this one
is a nice read too and it was written after the others we we talked about okay okay I think it is interesting that journey to the center of the earth like that is the most one that's still ahead of where we are I saw a youtube video the other day that was about like attempts to drill
as far into the crust as possible and we have not gotten very far and and it's that's really interesting that we haven't caught up with what jewels were in yet correct then it's just liquid hot magma for like 50,000 miles that's a small issue yeah yeah yeah of course eventually you get
through the bottom and and hit the shell of the turtle but turtles all the way down yes yeah yeah I was throwing out a stop to the flatter thers there so yeah I was gonna show y'all I got an ad years ago on tiktok for these things called book wallets and I had a count of money crystal one
for years but I lost my wallet but I got a new one and it's 20,000 leagues under the sea and it's like a little book but it's where I keep my credit cards in my ID I love it so a lot of people think it's a new testament but it's not it looks like a little gittian bible it's not so many people
that know me I'm like you know I don't care around a bible come on but yeah so it's just I love it so that's funny I like that idea yeah so if you just google like I'm not plugging them it's like book wallets there's a bunch of good ones I'm still waiting for them to do a moby dick one they
haven't yet but this is an express thing so okay um I mean it kind of suffice it to say right like if if you're somebody who likes something like 20,000 leagues under the sea might want to read the mysterious island because that's that's another Nemo story right I saw it when when I logged it
on goodreads it said Captain Nemo number two for 20,000 leagues under the sea and I thought what well why is that number two yeah he's actually a small part of the story but yeah he's in it he's at the end of that story okay in my mind I have to admit that sometimes I get HG Wells and
Joe's Fern mixed up and and you know I think of one of the titles and think now which one of them was it that wrote that actually during his lifetime sometimes the G Wells was called the English Veyron and he hated that he wanted to be his own man you know which you know fair yeah but he
was clearly a successor you could say to a point to to Veyron you know and he did great stories to him too I mean I don't want to lower him yeah yeah okay I think I think we can probably leave it there in manual so where where can people end you yes so they can find me on lafetepodcast.com
or on any podcast app that they want I'm also a present on many social media sites like Blue Sky and Threads and the meta ones not on X anymore and I'd be happy to have your comments on my episodes and the next one maybe I've interest to you because it's in August 2024 I'm going to
I did an interview with an American historian called Elizabeth Rees and it's the 200th anniversary of Lafete comeback to America in 1824 when he visited the then 24 states that you had so that's for August 2024 cool all right how about you Hayley where can people find you Hugo girl podcast.com
and Hugo girl podcasts on all the socials and nerds of a feather on their socials and their website I do movie reviews and the occasional Star Wars show recap nice all right well thank you both for doing this I really appreciate it yeah what's fun all right thank you Buku Seth yes
and bye see y'all later well folks I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Emmanuel and Hayley and I do definitely hope that you check out some jewels for a fascinating author great history of the genre as well just to to kind of see where the genre came from and I absolutely encourage you
to check out Emmanuel's podcast about you know all the historical background about the author is really really good stuff and you know he's got many many other great episodes on a lot of topics that uh mostly we didn't earn in school as Americans and of course check out Hugo girl as well
if you like what I do here and you have not checked them out you're gonna like what they do there and then you know we do it slightly differently and that's cool but I think that's gonna do it for this time so thank you so much for listening bye everyone the theme music for the Hugo's their podcast was composed and performed by Tim Kuski