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The Meteor Hunt: The First English Translation of Verne's Original Manuscript (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

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The Meteor Hunt, a translation of La Chasse au météore, is a work of the foremost literary importance, both within and outside its genre. This is one of the best Verne translations I have read (in over nearly forty years of reading Verne), filled with idioms vividly conveyed in a modern manner that reveals the experience of the team of noted Verne translators Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller, the dean of American Verne translators. As the first critical English-language edition of an original version of Jules Verne's posthumously published novels, and as science fiction, The Meteor Hunt is one of the most significant publications of its type.

There are two major misconceptions about Verne's later works. First, that they demonstrated a slackening imagination and literary ability, and second that they reveal a distrust of science which is distinct from the optimistic tone of his earlier, more famous books. Verne's later books, without the editorial guidance (and censorship) of his mentor, publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, are more slender and tightly plotted, devoid of extraneous matter. Verne's focus is stronger, and The Meteor Hunt demonstrates this with its continual tracing of the meteor's human effects, with only minor subplots that enhance the primary narrative.

The Meteor Hunt is revelatory of Verne's view of the United States, the capstone of a series of stories using an American setting or persons. The tone is light, the characterizations memorable, full of sharp wit and delicate irony, with the whole perfectly plotted. The Meteor Hunt also displays a warm cynicism, gently chiding the amateur scientists, the American competitiveness they represent, and the greed first for glory, then for gold that is a basic element of human nature.

The tension mounts as the two astronomers, simultaneously discovering the meteor, become antagonists, spreading the conflict to their families, ultimately igniting the partisan press and leading to an international rivalry. With the realization that the meteor is composed of gold, and descending in its orbit around the Earth, their own feud over its ownership is reflected in larger terms against the backdrop of the possible global economic ramifications. Verne was aware that any meteor of gold would have melted in the atmosphere, given the low temperature at which gold becomes liquid, but scientific accuracy was not the purpose. As international conferences struggle to resolve the matter ineffectually, Verne carries his satire to a new level, with a global indictment of competing national interests over an extra-terrestrial object.

Previously, La Chasse au météore had only been available in translations from a version rewritten by Verne's son, Michel, variously entitled in English The Chase of the Golden Meteor (first published contemporaneously with the French edition in 1909) and The Hunt for the Meteor (published in 1965). The Meteor Hunt is unique among the original editions of the posthumous novels in that the reader can easily access a translation of the alternate text that Michel wrote: The Chase of the Golden Meteor was reprinted in 1998 by the very same press that is now publishing The Meteor Hunt, but without noting the issue of authorship (see my review under that title). From a literary standpoint, The Meteor Hunt is superior, especially for its translation and critical notes. Nonetheless, many readers, especially science fiction enthusiasts, will be curious to read the other edition. In this way the differences between the two texts may be explored and readers may decide for themselves on the respective merits of the two Vernes, father and son.

Michel makes his most substantial intervention in the novel by changing its genre from what might be most appropriately called speculative fiction into outright science fiction. 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. While lacking the effortless simplicity of his father's expression, Michel deepens his father's themes, adding to the melodrama.

The Meteor Hunt is the first in a projected series of four Jules Verne books from the University of Nebraska Press that were previously translated only in the versions modified by Michel, using manuscripts that were discovered in the 1970s. The Meteor Hunt was translated from one of the seven posthumously published Verne novels that were guided into print by 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; indeed the two had already collaborated during the father's lifetime. Whatever the reason or motive, Michel altered all the works posthumously published under his father's name, in both minor and major ways, even originating two of the books himself. Subsequently, Michel carried forward his rewriting of his father's stories by adapting them to the screen as a movie producer. The story of Jules and Michel and their collaboration, both together and after the father's death, is a saga of science fiction authorship that is only beginning to be told, and The Meteor Hunt and the University of Nebraska Press series do much to bring it to light for readers.