Jules Verne Forum

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Early Verne time travel story?

From: Adam Tilghman <agt~at~mib.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 16:12:13 -0800 (PST)
To: jvf~at~Gilead.org.il

Hello,

I'm trying to determine whether the story outlined below was actually
written by Verne, and if so, whether the text still exists. The person
who made reference to the story passed away a few years ago, otherwise
I'd ask him directly.

Thank you for any help you can give,

Adam Tilghman
San Diego, Calif. USA

>Date: 14 Jun 91 17:29:09 GMT
>From: potter~at~csusac.ecs.csus.edu (Carl Kolchak)
>Subject: Re: Jules Verne
>To: SF-LOVERS~at~rutgers.edu
> [...]
>
>My favorite Verne was a shorter piece called "THE MARVELOUS TIME CAR,"
>which I've only seen in a Russian translation; never found a copy in
>English or French. Concerns yet another mad scientist who builds a tower
>in a cavern inside a mountain. The mountain is made of a powerful
>lodestone ore, and he uses electromagnets in the tower to make a hole in
>time; the top of the tower is 70-80 years in the future, and you can ride
>up and down in an elevator, and get off at the year you want. Obviously,
>you can't travel to a time before the tower was built, or after the tower
>is destroyed by the hero. The story concerns the mad scientist's
>psychological disintegration as he seeks to prevent the destruction of his
>invention; he knows only that it is blown up with dynamite, collapsing the
>mountain into the cavern, and his paranoiac behavior, attempting to stave
>off the destruction, is what motivates the hero to destroy it.
>
>I've often wondered if Wells read that one before he began writing the
>first version of "THE TIME MACHINE." As far as I know, it's the first
>experiment with looped causality in SF; just another achievement for Verne.
>(remember, this is only about 50 years after Mary Godwin wrote
>"FRANKENSTEIN;" Verne was creating major concepts in the field right and
>left, with no previous work to mine for contributing ideas!)
Received on Sat 23 Nov 2002 - 02:13:27 IST

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