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  The Mammoth Book of

  New Jules Verne

  Adventures

  Edited by Mike Ashley

  and Eric Brown

  CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS

  New York

  Carroll & Graf Publishers

  An imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.

  245 W. 17th Street

  New York

  NY 10011-5300

  www.carrollandgraf.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2005

  First Carroll & Graf edition 2005

  Collection and editorial material copyright © Mike Ashley and Eric Brown

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 0-7867-1495-6

  Printed and bound in the EU

  an ebookman scan

  CONTENTS

  The Mammoth Book of NEW JULES VERNE ADVENTURES

  COPYRIGHT AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Return to the Centre of the Earth

  A DRAMA ON THE RAILWAY by Stephen Baxter

  JEHAN THUN’S QUEST by Brian Stableford

  SIX WEEKS IN A BALLOON by Eric Brown

  LONDRES AU XXIE SIÈCLE by James Lovegrove

  GIANT DWARFS by Ian Watson

  CLIFF RHODES AND THE MOST IMPORTANT JOURNEY by Peter Crowther

  1 The two strangers

  2 Ernest Hemingway was a bullfighter?!

  3 In the presence of a literary man

  4 What the hell’s `tipsey’?

  5 Enter Cliff Rhodes

  6 The man on the bus

  7 Thick with possibilities

  8 The second parchment

  9 The back room

  10 A parting of the ways

  11 A sense of closure

  THE TRUE STORY OF BARBICANE’S VOYAGE by Laurent Genefort

  1 What History Records . . .

  2 Columbus of the Moon

  3 The Selenites

  4 The Philosophical Calculator

  5 “The Moon had revealed all its Secrets”

  COLUMBIAD by Stephen Baxter

  TABLEAUX by F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre

  THE SECRET OF THE NAUTILUS by Michael Mallory

  DOCTOR BULL’S INTERVENTION by Keith Brooke

  1 Sunny Meadows?

  2 Maddy and Nicholas consult

  3 Tracy butts in

  4 Who, then, was Dr Bull?

  5 All returned to normal

  6 Consternation and a critical point

  7 In the following weeks

  8 A Heroic Resolution

  9 Gideon gives advice

  10 The distant view

  11 Matters go so far

  12 Denouement

  THE VERY FIRST AFFAIR by Johan Heliot

  EIGHTY LETTERS, PLUS ONE by Kevin J. Anderson & Sarah A. Hoyt

  THE ADVENTURERS’ LEAGUE by Justina Robson

  HECTOR SERVADAC, FILS by Adam Roberts

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  THE MYSTERIOUS IOWANS by Paul Di Filippo

  OLD LIGHT by Tim Lebbon

  THE SELENE GARDENING SOCIETY by Molly Brown

  Chapter One: J. T. Maston takes up gardening

  Chapter Two: In which a solution is suggested

  Chapter Three: A delegation

  Chapter Four: Fiona thinks it through

  Chapter Five: A garden on the moon

  Chapter Six: The great work begins, and a cablegram arrives

  Chapter Seven: A Frenchman, a Norwegian, and a cannon

  Chapter Eight: A new beginning

  A MATTER OF MATHEMATICS by Tony Ballantyne

  THE SECRET OF THE SAHARA by Richard A. Lupoff

  THE GOLDEN QUEST by Sharan Newman

  THE TRUE STORY OF WILHELM STORITZ by Michel Pagel

  1 2

  THE SHOAL by Liz Williams

  CONTRIBUTORS

  End of New Jules Verne Adventures

  COPYRIGHT AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All stories, except those listed below, are original to this anthology and are copyright © 2005 in the name of the individual authors. They are used by permission of the authors and their agents.

  “Columbiad” is © 1996 by Stephen Baxter. First published in Science Fiction Age, May 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The True Story of Barbicane’s Voyage” © 1999 by Laurent Genefort. Originally published as “Le Veritable Voyage de Barbicane” in Futurs anterieurs (Fleuve noir, 1999). It is published here in English for the first time. Printed by permission of the author.

  Our thanks to Jean-Marc Lofficier and Victor Berch for their advice and help.

  INTRODUCTION: Return to the Centre of the Earth

  Jules Verne was a phenomenon.

  In a writing life spanning over forty years, he produced more than sixty novels of adventure and exploration, creating a sub-genre of fiction that exploded on to the world at a time when both the advances of science and technolo
gy, and the physical exploration of the world, were proceeding at an exponential rate.

  Jules Verne was born in Nantes in 1828, to a prosperous middle-class family. His father was a successful lawyer who hoped that his eldest son might follow him into the profession. But Verne dreamed of adventure. As a boy, living in the port of Nantes, he day-dreamed of sailing around the world. Family legend has it that he even stowed away aboard a ship, only to be dragged home by his irate father when the ship docked further down the French coast. In 1848 Verne did escape — though only as far as Paris, where he combined working on the stock exchange with penning much bad poetry and short comedy plays which were staged at the Théâtre Lyrique and the Théâtre Historique, without success or critical acclaim.

  He sold a few short stories around this time, the first being “Les Premiers Navires de la marine mexicaine” (usually translated as “The Mutineers” or “A Drama in Mexico”) which appeared in the monthly magazine Musée des families in July 1851.

  It was not until 1863, with the publication of his first book, Five Weeks in a Balloon, that success and acclaim eventually came to Verne. This is the story of Dr Fergusson, his friend Dick Kennedy and loyal man-servant Joe Smith, and their intrepid balloon journey across the continent of Africa from Zanzibar to Senegal. Headlong adventure alternates with much (often, it must be said, too much) scientific detail — but the story caught the imagination of readers in France, Britain and America. The novel was a best-seller, its documentary narrative convincing some readers that it was a true account.

  Verne was fortunate that his publisher, Jules Hetzel, was one of the most enterprising in France, and he saw the potential in Verne’s work. He gave Verne a contract for three books a year and also used Verne as the final catalyst to launch his new magazine for younger readers, the Magasin d’Education et de Récréation. The first issue appeared on 20 March 1864 featuring the opening instalment of Verne’s new novel, Les Anglais au Pole Nord (The English at the North Pole).

  With a publisher keen to bring out his books, many serialized during the year and published in volume form in time for Christmas, Jules Verne’s writing career was under way. Over the course of the next ten years he wrote the novels for which he is famous today: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Round the Moon (1870), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1873), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), and The Mysterious Island (1874). These novels sold in their tens of thousands and Verne became a wealthy man, often turning out two novels a year in a non-stop writing routine that was to last until his death in 1905.

  His later books abandoned much of the scientific detail of his early novels, and he concentrated on portraying adventures set in the four corners of the globe. While these were not as popular as his scientific romances, and sales declined towards the end of his life, his work was still in sufficient demand after his death for his publisher to bring out several volumes co-authored with (and some wholly written by) his son Michel.

  Verne is often cited today as one of the founding fathers of science fiction, along with H.G. Wells. The fact is that Verne rarely extrapolated from scientific advances to create visions of the future — his novels were firmly grounded in the here and now of the late Victorian period. The genre Verne created had no name — though it’s as much the forerunner of the modern techno-thriller as it was science fiction — and there were precious few other exponents: he was a craftsman who chiselled out his own niche to create stories wholly Vernian. In his better known and most highly regarded novels, he tapped into the burgeoning scientific curiosity of the age and brought a clear-minded technological understanding to stirring stories of derring-do and adventure in various parts of the world — as well as under the sea and in space.

  Looking back, it is easy to credit Verne with greater originality than in fact he possessed. His first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), was suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax” (1844). Another Poe story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837), inspired Verne to write a direct sequel, The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields (1897). His two-part novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Round the Moon (1870), were preceded by Irish author Murtagh McDermot’s Trip to the Moon (1728), whose hero’s return from the moon is assisted by 7,000 barrels of gunpowder and a cylindrical hole dug one mile deep into the moon’s surface — a foreshadowing of Verne’s means of firing his own characters moon-ward from the barrel of a giant gun. Verne’s Clipper of the Clouds (1886), and the sequel The Master of the World (1904), featuring a massive propeller-driven airship The Albatross, lifted ideas from the works of the US writer Luis Senarens (Frank Reade Jnr and his Air Ship, Frank Reade Jnr in the Clouds, etc) with whom Verne corresponded. Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), was not the first story of subterranean adventure: the German physicist Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) was the author of Mundus Subterraneus, and in 1741 Ludvig Baron von Holberg published Nicolai Klimii iter Subterraneum, the story of mountaineer Klim and his adventures after falling down a hole in the Alps and discovering a miniature subterranean solar system. Mathias Sandorf (1885) is Verne’s take on Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), while his fascination with shipwrecked heroes can be traced back to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and J.R. Weiss’ Swiss Family Robinson (1812): Verne even referred to his own ‘castaway’ books as Robinsonades.

  However, to accuse Verne of lack of originality would be to miss the point. He was original in his genius of marrying the latest technological breakthroughs with geographical adventure, written with a keen eye for scientific detail which convinced the reader that, no matter how far-fetched the adventure, the events portrayed were indeed possible. The first submarine had been built and tested by Cornelius Drebble in 1620 and a submarine, the Henley, was used in the American Civil War in 1864, so Verne was hardly predicting the vessel. But his vision of a super-powered submarine capable of travelling around the world was the inspiration that led to the first nuclear-powered submarine eventually launched in 1955 and named the USS Nautilus in deference to Verne’s creation. It was Verne’s vision in pushing the barriers of technology and exploring the world that emerged which was a major factor in encouraging the technological revolution that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Verne also created some of the most memorable characters in fiction. Once encountered who can forget Phileas Fogg, Captain Nemo, Impey Barbicane or the mysterious Robur, forerunners in some ways of the later “mad scientist”. If he were alive today Verne would have been an ideal candidate for continuing the James Bond novels!

  Jules Verne’s writing life encompassed much of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time of great upheaval, scientific enlightenment, and social change. His work, reflecting the ideas and ideals of his time, has the enduring appeal of all literature written with passion and commitment. That it is still being read over a hundred years after it was written is a testament to Verne’s ability to communicate to generation after generation of readers the wonder of adventure and exploration.

  This volume, published on the centenary of Verne’s death, presents twenty-three stories in homage to the French master of adventure. Using as a starting point the works of Jules Verne, his ideas, stories and characters and the life of the man himself, the gathered writers have produced a range of entertaining, adventurous, and thought-provoking stories. Ian Watson, for instance, reveals the true adventures that inspired Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Mike Mallory unveils the mystery of the later life of Captain Nemo, whilst Molly Brown recounts the final endeavour of the Baltimore Gun Club. There are further sequels to Verve’s best known books, as well as stories based on some of his lesser known novels and stories.

  We’d like to think that Jules Verne would have approved.

  A DRAMA ON THE RAILWAY by Stephen Baxter

  We are all the products of our childhood and one may wonder just what events the young Jules-Gabriel Verne witnessed that later fired his imag
ination for his great adventure stories. Here, as a prelude to those later adventures, Stephen Baxter takes a flight of fancy to Verne’s infancy and the dawn of the railways.

  “He came to Liverpool,” the old man said to me. “The French fellow. He came here! Or at least he rode by on the embankment. He came with his father to see the industrial wonder of the age. And not only that, though he was only a child, he saved the life of a very important man. You won’t read it in any of the history books. It was all a bit of a scandal. But it’s true nonetheless. I’ve got proof . . .” And he produced a tin box, which he began to prise open with long, trembling fingers.

  It was 1980. I was in my twenties. I had come back to my childhood home to visit family and friends.

  And on a whim I had called in on old Albert Rastrick, who lived in a pretty old house called the Toll Gate Lodge, on the Liverpool road about half a mile from my parents’

  home. I’d got to know Albert ten years before when I had come knocking on his door asking questions about local history for a school project. He was a nice old guy, long widowed, and his house was full of mementoes of family, and of the deeper history of the house itself.

  But he had been born with the century, so he was eighty years old. His living room with its single window was a dark, cluttered, dusty cavern. Sitting there with a cup of lukewarm tea, watching Albert struggle with that tin box, I was guiltily impatient to be gone.

  He got the box open and produced a heap of papers, tied up with a purple ribbon. It was a manuscript, written out in a slightly wild copperplate. “A Drama on the Railway,” it was titled, “An Autobiographical Memoir, by Lily Rastrick (Mrs.) née Ord . . .”

  “Lily was my great-great-grandmother,” Albert said. “Born 1810, I believe. Produced my great-grandfather in 1832, who produced my granddad in 1851, who produced my father in 1876, who produced me. All those generations born and raised in this old house. And all that time that tin box has stayed in the family. Go on, read it,” he snapped.

  I gently loosened the knot in the purple ribbon. Dust scattered from the folds, but the material, perhaps silk, was still supple. The paper was thick, creamy, obviously high quality. I lifted the first page to see better in the light of the small window: “It was on the 15th Sept. in the year 18—