Bruce Sterling - Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne

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Bruce Sterling

bruces@well.sf.ca.us

CATSCAN 1 "Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne"

A kind of SF folk tradition surrounds the

founding figure of Jules Verne. Everyone knows he was

a big cheese back when the modern megalopolis of

SFville was a 19th-century village. There's a bronze

monument to him back in the old quarter of town, the

Vieux Carre. You know, the part the French built, back

before there were cars.

At midnight he stands there, somewhat the worse

for the acid rain and the pigeons, his blind bronze

eyes fixed on a future that has long since passed him

by. SFville's citizenry pass him every day without a

thought, their attention fixed on their daily grind in

vast American high-rises; if they look up, they are

intimidated by the beard, the grasped lapel, the

flaking reek of Victorian obsolescence.

Everyone here knows a little about old Jules.

The submarine, the moon cannon, the ridiculously

sluggish eighty days. When they strip up the tarmac,

you can still see the cobbles of the streets he laid.

It's all still there, really, the village grid of

SFville, where Verne lived and worked and argued

scientific romance with the whippersnapper H.G. Wells.

Those of us who walk these mean streets, and mutter of

wrecking balls and the New Jerusalem, should take the

time for a look back. Way back. Let's forget old Jules

for the moment. What about young Jules?

Young Jules Verne was trouble. His father, a

prosperous lawyer in the provincial city of Nantes,

was gifted with the sort of son that makes parents

despair. The elder Verne was a reactionary Catholic,

given to frequent solitary orgies with the penitential

scourge. He expected the same firm moral values in his

heir.

Young Jules wanted none of this. It's sometimes

mentioned in the SF folktale that Jules tried to run

away to sea as a lad. The story goes that he was

recaptured, punished, and contritely promised to

travel henceforth "only in his imagination." It sounds

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Bruce Sterling - Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne

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