Voyage Beneath the Waves: A Science Fiction Novel
Jules Rengade
Language: English
Pages: 82
ISBN: 2:00255131
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Voyage Beneath the Waves was published two years prior to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne, when he became aware of Jules Rengade's serial version, felt obliged to write the magazine editor to set the record straight—HE'D developed the idea independently! In fact, the influence was very much the other way around: although Rengade had come up with the idea of an imaginary voyage of submarine exploration separately, he'd modeled his narrative style on Verne's, thus producing the first "Vernean" novel written by someone other than the great man himself.
This is the first fictional use of a man-made submersible to explore the ocean depths—and it remains a very readable entry into the then-new genre of science fiction.
was Verne’s hard labor that provided the other ninety-nine. As Voyage sous les flots illustrates very obviously, the strategy was relatively impotent in the absence of the craftsmanship to put it into practice with due artistry. Rengade also demonstrated, as Verne did –again, more successfully—that once the priorities have been reversed, there is a tendency for the popularization of science to fade away entirely, so that the climactic phases of such endeavors become pure and unalloyed melodrama.
suddenly appeared on the swing, holding the electric harpoon in a threatening manner. Marcel and Trinitus, breathless and gripped by fear, instinctively squeezed one another’s hand. They experienced an indescribable anguish. Suddenly, a lightning-bolt sprang from the bosom of the waters; the sound of a thunderclap, followed by a noise similar to that produced by the fall of a stream of lava into the sea, resounded in their ears. The boat recoiled abruptly and the most frightful silence
weapons, and, joyful on seeing that they were still breathing, bound them solidly with lianas and thongs. Then a scene commenced which chilled the two prisoners with terror. A few Alfouours lit a big fire in the middle of the ravine, and Marcel was dragged by the ferocious cannibals to the edge of the blaze. Just as knives brought to red heat in the flames were approaching his tremulous limbs, however, twenty more savages ran up carrying a kind of stretcher made of tree branches, and shouting
their burden. Some of the warriors following the stretcher helped the porters from time to time; others, uttering loud howls of joy, triumphantly ran ahead, clearing the way. The country that the frightful caravan traversed was splendid. A thousand flowering shrubs embalmed the atmosphere with their sickly emanations; swarms of beetles were fluttering through the trees in all directions; magnolias with white flowers were filled with birds; the horizon, sometimes closed by a curtain of woodland,
unicorn. The small quantity of air contained in the diving-suit in which Nicaise was clad had sufficed to preserve him from asphyxia, but he had fallen unconscious and dragged by the narwhal, without having any suspicion of it, all the way to the Alfourous’ island, where he had run aground with it on the coast. As chance would have it, at that very moment, the indigenes were celebrating the great festival of the sun on the sea shore. At the sight of the unicorn, which had brought a human body