RE: I hate Star Trek fans doing this.
August 15, 2016 at 11:36 pm
(This post was last modified: August 15, 2016 at 11:42 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
It's not a reduction at all. Yes, he was fascinated. The setting of sci-fi is sci. The authors are nerdy as all get out (lol). That's both why and how the genre works. It doesn't detract from (nor is it a detraction from) what the vehicle of sci-fi is used for. In Vern'es case, and particularly in the cases of 20k....the social message was more prophetic than the, as you put it, almost magical descriptions of how everything just worked because of electricity. People are impressed with the scuba analog...but forget that we're discussing an author who needed his characters free from lines attached to their diving helmets to drive the plot. So yes, fascination...but also narrative convenience and efficiency. Verne -may- have thought that scuba was possible...but maybe not. In the narrative, it's fully realized for reasons not at all related to it's scientific plausibility.
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