Customer Reviews

The Kip Brothers (Early Classics of Science Fiction)

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My review is based on an old Turkish translation of this book, but I believe my criticisms would apply to this edition.

Verne's style was boring; he was repetitious and took too long to get to the point. Besides, there were long discourses on the geography and history of the southeast Pacific, international politics and even the Fenians, while the Kip Brothers didn't enter the story until chapter 7.

The story started out as a maritime adventure, then turned into a murder "mystery", although the identities of the murderers were revealed as they were committing it. The Kip Brothers got wrongly accused of the crime and spent a long time (the final third of the book) to clear their name.

Verne's weakness was that he told too much to his readers and left very little to the imagination. He explained everything in detail even when what he was explaining was obvious. In this case, he would have crafted a much better story if he had hidden the identities of the murderers from his readers.

The climax was a real letdown. Verne resorts to the ridiculous late 19th century claim that a dead person's eyes retained an image of the last thing he saw. In comparison, for example, the science behind H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man, is also quite untenable, but it never turns into an issue of exasperation mainly because of Wells' much better narrative.