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Machine conquest: Jules Verne's technocratic worldmaking
Machine conquest: Jules Verne’s technocratic worldmaking
Footnote 52 He collected clippings and findings, scoured encyclopaedias and natural histories for morsels of fact and proper jargon, closely followed the latest scientific journals of whichever field his hero was meant to be versed in, and then condensed everything into meticulous descriptions filling the pages of his novels. Likewise, in Five Weeks in a Balloon, as in many other Voyages, every time the protagonists encounter a foreign place, they make it intelligible by recounting the stories of European explorers in whose footsteps they were following: ‘Then came the illustrious Mungo Park, the friend of Sir Walter Scott, and, like him, a Scotchman by birth. In a set-up that is nearly identical with that of Twenty Thousand Leagues u,nder the Sea, the two engineers Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans, having been embroiled in an unending debate at the institute concerning lighter-than-air versus heavier-than-air crafts, and their Black valet Frycollin are taken hostage by Robur.
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