Free The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin

romances of science that would be the equivalent of the historical romances of his mentor, Dumas. He criticized himself in a letter to his parents for “lingering on well-trodden paths, when science is performing miracles and thrusting into the unknown.” 49 Here in a phrase are the materials of the fruitful SF stories that Verne would write in the 1860s.
    In 1851, Verne published his first short story, “A Balloon Journey,” in which he not only symbolized the transition from Romantic to Victorian attitudes toward science, but clearly foreshadowed his own later work. Like so much of Verne, “A Balloon Journey” was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, then two years dead.
    In “A Balloon Journey,” a balloonist discovers a stowaway aboard his balloon car—“a pale and excited young man” 50 who tells him, “ ‘I have studied aerostatics thoroughly. It has affected my brain.’ ” 51 The young man claims that he knows the only way to steer a balloon. He wishes to plunge higher and higher into the celestial depths. “ ‘We shall land on the sun!’ ” 52 he cries. The balloonist and the madman wrestle for control of the ship. The Romantic falls to his death. The technologist survives and rides a leaky gas bag back to earth.
    Here, in this one early short story, is the very substance of later Verne. In Verne during the Sixties, there is the extension of fact beyond fact, as in the experimental balloon of this story. There are the great visions of impossible possibility, like the madman’s dream of landing on the sun. Finally, there is the split between the dreamer and the man of fact, the man of fact’s fear of reaching too high and falling, and a wrestle between the two for control.
    Before these intimations of 1851 bore fruit, more time had to pass. Verne was not yet ready to write his significant stories. He did not yet recognize his materials or know how to express them. Before he would discover his form and his audience, he would spend more than ten years as an unsuccessful playwright, the victim of a catalog of psychosomatic disorders, a man forced to earn a living as a stockbroker.
    By the early 1860s, Verne was in a state of desperation, the literary success he had hoped to attain by the age of 35 still eluding him. He had written a long essay on Edgar Allan Poe, but had been unable to sell it to his usual essay market. A book-length manuscript on the history of ballooning, including speculation on the use of balloons in African exploration, had met with rejection. Verne even threw the manuscript into the fire, from which his wife rescued it.
    In the fall of 1862, Verne’s friend, the balloonist and pioneer photographer Nadar, whom Verne had met at the new club, Le Cercle de la Presse Scientifique, and from whom he had derived many of his ideas on the future of ballooning, directed Jules to Pierre Hetzel. Hetzel was a publisher of George Sand and of Balzac whose new specialty line of books for children had been so successful that he was entertaining plans for a children’s magazine. He was looking for writers.
    Hetzel declined to publish Verne’s book in its original form. He suggested that it might be rewritten as a story for boys presenting all the factual matter Verne had gathered, but focusing on the possibilities of exploration of Africa by balloon. Verne had written no fiction since 1855, only essays and plays. Here, however, suddenly, was a possibility that resonated with that idea Verne had once entertained of writing a romance of science like the historical romances of his friend Dumas. But not a romance . . . a strange journey, a thrust into the unknown using the powers of advanced science.
    Verne rushed home and began to write furiously. In a matter of two weeks, so great was the power of the spell that gripped him, he produced a novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, which Hetzel published as a book the day before Christmas, 1862.
    Verne’s story concerns the crossing of the continent of