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by GuiA
3541 days ago
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Brilliant, and eloquently phrases something I've tried to convey to myriad technologists during my time in the valley: "When I was young my father read to me “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” advertising it as a great classic of futuristic science fiction. Unfortunately, I was unimpressed. It didn’t seem “futuristic” at all: it seemed like an archaic fantasy. Why? Certainly it was impressive that an author in 1869 correctly predicted that people would ride in submarines under the sea. But it didn’t seem like an image of the future, or even the past, at all. Why not? Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants. Futurists consistently get their stories wrong in a particular way: when they say that technology changes the world, they tell stories of fabulous gadgets that will enable people to do new and exciting things. They completely miss that this is not really what “change” – serious, massive, wrenching, social change - really is. When technology truly enables dreams of change, it doesn’t mean it enables aristocrats to dream about riding around under the sea. What it means is that enables the aristocrat’s butler to dream of not being a butler any more — a dream of freedom not through violence or revolution, but through economic independence. A dream of technological change – really significant technological change – is not a dream of spiffy gadgets, it is a dream of freedom, of social & economic liberation enabled by technology." |
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As someone who actually read Jules Verne (instead of watching the Disney movie or reading a poorly-translated abridgement,) I would not characterize Nemo as a Victorian gentleman.
First of all Verne wasn't English, and Nemo isn't a Victorian gentleman, he's a rebel and a terrorist. He doesn't have appropriately deferential Victorian servants, he has fellow freedom fighters.
Arronax's servant Consiel is the closest to a "appropriately deferential Victorian servant" but the way he is written, he comes across as a borderline Asperger's Syndrome savant scientist, not at all like Mercury from "Bleak House."
I get that people make up stuff to support their thoughts and biases, but calling Jules Verne a Victorian writer is simply incorrect. He's a lot closer to Dumas than Dickens.