The Verne School in France

During the final decades of the nineteenth century in France, the unprecedented success of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires began to generate a host of "Verne School" imitators including Paul d'Ivoi, Louis Boussenard, Maurice Champagne, Georges Le Faure, and Henry de Graffigny, among others. They were very prolific and specialized in science-fictional adventure stories that recycled the same themes of exploration and technology and the same narrational trademarks of didacticism and Bildungsroman that characterized Verne's most memorable fictions. This essay examines the sf works of the most popular of these Verne School writers, Paul d'Ivoi. In the history of French science fiction, d'Ivoi's twenty-one novels, collectively titled the Voyages Excentriques, may be viewed as a kind of stepping-stone between Verne's generally conservative "hard sf" model and the more fantastic "speculative sf" of early twentieth-century sf writers such as J.-H. Rosny aîné, Gustave Le Rouge, and Maurice Renard

Art · French Literature and Critical Theory · Travel Writing and Literature

• Other Kingdoms

  Terry Harpold, Terry Harpold Terry Harpold•Science Fiction Studies•2012

  Add to list