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

Africa from east to west by a party of Englishmen in a balloon named the Victoria. Five Weeks in a Balloon obviously owes something in inspiration to Poe’s “A Balloon Hoax” (1844), in which a party of Englishmen is said to have crossed the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in a balloon also named the Victoria.
    Just like the actual European explorers of Africa of the time, Verne’s travelers hope to spy that once nearly mystical goal, the sources of the Nile. Verne writes: “Formerly, to seek the sources of the Nile was regarded as the act of a madman; a wild dream, in fact.” 53
    The Victoria is a minimally transcendent super-scientific balloon. It was based on the new experimental design of Verne’s friend Nadar, then in the planning stage, with the addition of a furnace to heat hydrogen so that the balloon might rise and fall in search of favorable air currents without the use of ballast or the loss of gas. This science-beyond-science may seem questionable today—to heat hydrogen in this manner would surely risk an explosion—but Verne made it appear thoroughly plausible to the audience he was addressing by the confident citing of “fact.”
    Within the story, so effective is Verne’s imaginary science that the Victoria successfully negotiates its passage across Africa, whereas, by contrast, the nonfictional (and non-steerable) balloon constructed by Nadar crashed after a flight in Europe of only four hundred miles in October 1863. Verne’s balloon crosses portions of Africa that were then unexplored. However, nothing more fundamentally mysterious than the sources of the Nile is spied. The Nile is confirmed to have its rise in Lake Victoria, as the English explorer John Speke had suggested in 1858, and the characters congratulate themselves that their “discoveries are entirely in accord with the forecastings of science.” 54
    In the France of 1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon was exactly the right book at the right moment. The use of domesticated science-beyond-science to influence the present-day world was something new in fiction. Verne’s story was an imagination, to be sure, but so spare and in command of fact was it, so confident and plausible in presentation, that it almost might be tomorrow’s headline.
    And it was. Not only was the construction and launching of Nadar’s actual balloon widely discussed in the press in 1863, but, in a masterpiece of timing, just after Five Weeks in a Balloon was published, John Speke emerged again from the jungle to say that he had found the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria the previous July—just one month after Verne’s fictional balloon was supposed to have made its passage. To use imaginary science to steal a march on the contemporary explorers of Africa, and be proven correct—how audacious! Five Weeks in a Balloon was a great popular success, not just with those boys born since mid-century who were its intended audience, but with adults as well.
    Here, at last, was the literary career that Verne had always desired. He bade farewell to his friends at the stock exchange—according to one of them, in these words:

    I am leaving you. I have had an idea, the sort of idea that, according to Girardin, ought to come to every man once a day, but has come to me only once in my life, the sort of idea that should make a man’s fortune. I have just written a novel in a new form, one that is entirely my own. If it succeeds, I shall have stumbled upon a gold mine. In that case, I shall go on writing and writing without pause, while the rest of you will go on buying shares the day before they drop, and selling them the day before they rise. I am leaving the Bourse. Good evening, my friends. 55

    What was this once-in-a-lifetime idea that had descended upon Verne and kissed him on the brow so tenderly? Lacking direct testimony from Verne of the kind that we have had from our earlier writers, it is difficult to say how he might have phrased his intentions in 1863—or how