h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

""and the moment he
(the reader) closes the cover and reflects he wakes
up to their impossibility." ""

yes, 20,000 leagues under the sea.....pure fantisy

I think I may have confused the issue with my
selective editing of the HGWElls quote. Wells
was saying that Verne's stories were of a more
practical nature which actually predicted possible
real-whirled futures such as Capt Nemo's sub and
the big cannon in Florida that shoots capsules up
to the moon.

He considered his own stories, such as the Time
Machine, the Invisible Man, War of the Whirleds,
the Food of the Gods, the Days of the Comet, etc.,
to be more purely fantasy and never intended to ever
be anything like accurate science predictions.

He went on to say that he had deliberately replaced
the old story-tellers' invocation of magic with vague
notions of science to set up impossible situations
simply because no one believed in magic anymore.

To put it simply, he considered Verne a great writer
of science-fiction predictions and himself a humanist
who used fantasy whirleds the way the ancient myths
do to reveal human nature by studying man in impossible
dream whirled situations. The funny bit is that his
impossible dreams very often included some fairly
accurate descriptions of future possibilities.

For example his Island of Dr Moreau was intended to be
a modern retelling of tales about witch doctors and
animism and man's moral relationship to the animal whirled;
he had no idea what evils we would be doing today with
such 'impossibilities' as genetics and organ transplants.

And his description of an accidental explosion of a new
negative-gravity 'fuel' for the machine that would carry
the First Men In The Moon is eerily like an atomic blast
in scope and effect - it was 'impossibly' huge in terms
of the munitions and the physics available prior to WW1
let alone WW2.


~jwf~