Customer Reviews

The Chase of the Golden Meteor (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

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It's happened again.
A reputable publisher, Bison Books, distributed through the University of Nebraska Press, has attractively reprinted a Jules Verne book whole from the first British edition, on that basis calling it unabridged. Yet there is no acknowledgment of two fundamental facts: it is (of course) a translation from the French, and, most importantly, it is not derived from the actual text written by Jules Verne.
Presumably Bison Books decided to reprint this little-known Verne novel in the same year that brought DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON into movie theaters. The Chase of the Golden Meteor contains a refreshing variation on this particular science fiction theme, one far different from the rather trite disaster formula the cinema has brought us. On the positive side, Bison's reprint of the 1909 Grant Richards text published in London wisely retains 23 of the original 35 illustrations by George Roux from the French editions. Although never crediting the artist, the capable reproductions of the Roux illustrations make The Chase of the Golden Meteor one of the most visually pleasing Verne paperbacks to have appeared in years.
Unfortunately, nowhere in Bison's volume is any comment to be found on essential textual topics. There is no mention of the translator or what kind of work s/he did; as the enhancement of the title from La Chasse au météore to The Chase of the Golden Meteor indicates, this is an imprecise translation, rearranging paragraphs, cutting numerous adjectives and sometimes whole sentences according to the translator's whim.
Even more significant is the fact that The Chase of the Golden Meteor was translated from one of the seven posthumously published Verne novels that were guided into print by the author's son, Michel. For many years, the Verne family argued that Michel's changes did not go beyond stylistic polishing, updating, or possible verbal instructions from father to son. However, once the evidence became public over twenty years ago, what even Verne's original publisher had known was clear. Michel substantively altered all the works posthumously published under his father's name, in both minor and major ways, even originating two of the books himself.
Jules Verne had dealt with "outer space" twice before in his novels, in the duo of De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865) and Autour de la lune (Around the Moon, 1870), and in Hector Servadac (1877). The original ending of Hector Servadac had the comet Gallia impacting the Earth in the Caspian Sea, which swallowed it with minimal affect on the planet, despite widely anticipated destruction and global panic. However, Gallia proves to be 30% gold, turning it from a scarce into a plentiful mineral, and diminishing the value of gold reserves. Verne's publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, compelled a rewriting that eliminated this climax, and Verne waited over twenty years to expand the idea suppressed by the elder Hetzel (who had since died) into a full-length novel.
In La Chasse au météore, two Virginia astronomers simultaneously discover a meteor heading toward Earth, and the subsequent rivalry, despite its amusing vanity, threatens the impending marriage of their respective son and daughter. When the meteor is discovered to be composed of gold, the disputed priority suddenly takes on serious international dimensions, and worldwide speculation ensues over the future value of the mineral. However, when the meteor lands on the shore of Greenland, it tumbles into the inaccessible depths of the ocean.
In rewriting La Chasse au météore, Michel expanded his father's novel from 17 chapters to 21 chapters, and made it more complex from a literary standpoint as well as enhancing the science fiction aspect. Michel adds a technological element to the novel, inserting a major new character, Zéphyrin Xirdal, an erratic scientist who has invented a device that attracts the comet to Earth, and brings it down from its orbit under his direction. Xirdal has selected Greenland for the landing, but becomes so disgusted by the global hysteria and his avaricious uncle's attempt to manipulate the event for profit that he finally causes the meteor to fall into the sea. While his father's forecasts were usually limited to what could be extrapolated from the known science of the day, Michel went considerably beyond these confining bounds of probability. This was true not only of Michel's version of La Chasse au météore, but also of other science fiction stories he wrote and published under his father's name.
While Bison's reprint of The Chase of the Golden Meteor uses the 1909 translation of the Michel version, there is no recognition of the obvious question of the true authorship of the novel. Certainly a fresh translation of the novel Jules Verne had actually written, from the French text published by the Société Jules Verne, would be preferable. Perhaps the press's budget only permitted a reprint of the 1909 translation, but certainly they ought to have admitted the problem. This cannot be laid to a basic ignorance of the facts that would be so typical of a commercial publisher. In fact, an email exchange between several Verne enthusiasts and Bison's editor in mid-1998 over precisely these issues revealed the publisher's awareness of the situation.
Certainly Bison Books has done a service in making a rare and important Verne work, out of print for over two decades, more readily available-but in far from optimal form. For more than thirty years, editions of Verne have deliberately explored textual issues surrounding their translation and the source French, in the translations of Willis T. Bradley, Anthony Bonner, Walter James Miller, Mendor T. Brunetti, Edward Baxter, Ron Miller, William Butcher, Emanuel Mickel, Evelyn Copeland, Frederick Paul Walter, and many others (including, I should acknowledge, the 1993 Oxford University Press edition of Adventures of the Rat Family in which I participated). For a publisher striving for academic standing to simply ignore these aspects is no longer acceptable, and in that respect Bison's The Chase of the Golden Meteor is little more than a throwback to the 1909 version it reprints.

Bison Books is doing a very nice (and nicely packaged) series of "classic," hard-to-find sf works from the early years of the 20th century. Why they picked this one, aside from the fact that it's been out of print for a while, is beyond me. It is not really science fiction at all, but more a satirical comedy of manners about the human foibles of pride and greed. An amateur astronomer from a small town in Virginia discovers a golden meteor streaking across the sky. At the same moment, a friend of his across town also discovers the meteor. Most of the book details their comic rivalry in attmepting to claim credit for being the first to find this amazing sight. Scientists theorize that it is made of solid gold and could be worth more money that all the earth's riches put together. More ink is spilled in showing the greed of the world's nations as they all try to claim a piece of the meteor and try to predict where the gold will land. A subplot involving a comic figure named Zephyrin Xirdal, who is able to affect the meteor's path and bring it down where he wants, is ludicrous, but I give the book two stars just because I love Xirdal's name! Not very good Verne, and definitely not very good sf.

Okay, it's not _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ or _From the Earth to the Moon_, but this late novel by one of the Godfathers of Science Fiction is an entertaining romp through Edwardian manners, comic nutcase characters, and some slippery and suspect science. Even the scientifically declined will quickly see the flaws in Verne's theories (a solid gold meteor?), and readers more inclined toward modern science fiction and action stories will quickly grow tired of the two melodramatic love stories and the endless comic buffoonery between competing amateur astronomers who want to lay claim to the golden meteor. But this novel really is -- plain simple -- a fun read. For 280+ pages, Jules Verne sweeps you off to a world of wonder and innocent scientific adventure, where even a threatened world wide economic collapse can be solved with some quick tinkering, and an eccentric scientist can forget about the most important accomplisment of his career on his way to the train station. And it's also funny...people often forget that Verne had a wickedly sly sense of humor. The gentlely "mad" scientist Xirdal, who cooks up a ridiculous scheme to retrieve the meteor (and, because this is a Jules Verne novel, it actually work), is a unique and charming character.

If all this sounds like your idea of a great time, I can't recommend _The Chase of the Golden Meteor_ highly enough. It's a romp, pure and simple. If you've enjoyed Verne's other works, you should sample this bit of little known fluff.

While this book may not be a masterpiece of science fiction, it is quite enjoyable. To be honest, it has been more than a year since I read the book, but I remember that I started reading it when I went to bed around midnight from where I had left off the night before and I had more than half the book left to read. That night I could not go to sleep until I finished the book, simply because I had to know how it ended (excuse me for being a bit vague but I don't want to give anything away to anyone who might want to read the book).
This book may appeal more to children, in that the ideas are somewhat beyond the realm of the possible, but it is still enjoyable to any open minded adult, especially if you like to read to your kids. The beginning of the book starts out slow, focusing on several different characters who at one point or another have some interest in the meteor, but are pushed aside by the middle of the book and all but forgotten. The "greed" of governments may not be the real issue, or at least it is not the only issue, as the author points out that the extreme value of the meteor, if not distributed correctly, could destroy any of the economies of the world. I think I've already given too much away, so I'll stop here. To sum it all up, it is a nice little book to read, so don't be discouraged by some negative comments made by others, give it a chance and decide for yourself.

This book was so vulgar, and degrading to women, that it is the last book I'll ever lay my hands on. It just goes to prove what I've always thought of Jules Verne. You would have to be a bigot to enjoy such revolting pulp. You'd be better off burning crosses on your neighbors front lawn than to invest a single cent, or a single second of your time in this evil, profane work! And Jules Verne fancied himself a Christian! I hope God smited him! Lord knows he deserved a painfully slow and brutal end. I am just sorry I couldn't give this unholy work Zero stars!