Neng Nana
In the summer of 2025, a visitor to Paris was treated to an extraordinary theatrical experience: a journey through the life and literary legacy of Jules Verne. The performance did more than merely recount the author’s bibliography; it physically transported the audience through the print shop of Verne’s legendary editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, into the iron-clad hull of the Nautilus, and finally, into the smoke-filled halls of the Baltimore Gun Club. There, they witnessed the fictional Barbicane proclaiming his audacious mission to launch a moonshot—a narrative arc that culminated in a surreal jump-cut to a recreation of NASA’s Mission Control.
As participants sat at terminals labeled "Navigation" and "Telemetry," surrounded by whiteboards covered in the complex rocket equations of Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and von Braun, the reality of the genre’s impact became tangible. When the countdown reached zero and each attendee was prompted to utter the final, fateful command—"Go"—the connection between 1865 fiction and 1969 reality felt absolute. Yet, this immersive experience invites a deeper, more critical inquiry: Have we, in our cultural obsession with Jules Verne as a "prophet" of technology, flattened the very medium of science fiction into nothing more than a list of future gadgets?
A Chronology of Prescience: From the Page to the Launchpad
The narrative that Jules Verne "predicted" the modern world is a cornerstone of literary history. It is a timeline that stretches from his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, to the Apollo 11 lunar landing over a century later. When Neil Armstrong returned from the Moon in 1969, he famously noted the historical symmetry: "A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His space ship, Columbia, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean… It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as a modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth."
This perceived prescience is not limited to space travel. Verne is consistently credited with anticipating the electrical submarine, the helicopter, and long-distance television. In his own time, contemporaries lauded his "divinatory prescience." Today, that trend continues in online media, where viral charts titled "Every Time Science Fiction Became Science Fact" act as modern breviaries, mapping the trajectory of human innovation as if it were a pre-written script.
However, this focus on "prediction" serves a specific, perhaps problematic, function. By retroactively validating fiction through the lens of engineering, we suggest that history follows an inevitable, linear path—a "Law of Progress" that leaves no room for the social, political, or ethical nuances that actually define the human experience.
The Myth of Inevitable Progress
The idea that history is a steady, upward climb toward technological perfection is a relatively recent Western invention. As scholars of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution note, the notion of continuous, open-ended anthropogenic improvement was articulated by figures like Francis Bacon, who sought to harness the natural world for the benefit of human life. By the 19th century, this philosophy had become the bedrock of the industrial age.
Jules Verne, often positioned as the herald of this era, frequently utilized characters like Michel Ardan to champion the inevitability of progress. Ardan’s proclamation—that traveling to the moon would one day be as mundane as taking a steamboat from New York to Liverpool—was a radical dream in the 1860s. Yet, to treat this as a blueprint for the future is to ignore the author’s own complexities.
Critics point out that Verne’s first novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century (which remained unpublished in his lifetime), offered a starkly dystopian vision of a world where technology and profit-driven greed had effectively extinguished art and human empathy. If we examine From the Earth to the Moon not as a technical manual, but as a satire, we see a portrait of a bellicose Baltimore Gun Club, composed of disillusioned artillery officers seeking a new venue for their destructive talents. Was Verne celebrating their "scientific" endeavor, or was he critiquing the dangerous intersection of military technology and nationalistic ego?
Sociological Extrapolation: The Real Value of SF
The tendency to reduce science fiction to a "list of inventions" obscures its true purpose. Science fiction is not merely about the "what"—the car, the submarine, or the rocket—it is about the "so what?"
As the science fiction author Frederik Pohl famously remarked, "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam." Verne understood this implicitly. He was not a solitary genius struck by lightning; he was a man living through a period of rapid industrialization, observing the professionalization of science and the resulting shifts in human society.
His Nautilus is the perfect case study. It is rarely acknowledged that submarines were already the subject of intense, urgent debate in the 1860s. European powers were locked in a clandestine arms race to develop undersea vessels. Verne did not "invent" the idea; he synthesized the era’s anxieties and explored the moral implications of such power. He created Captain Nemo, a disenfranchised prince using high-tech weaponry to engage in anti-colonial rebellion, effectively becoming a nation-state unto himself. Verne’s genius was not in the design of the submarine’s hull, but in his exploration of the power dynamics that such technology would inevitably create.
Official Responses and the "Torment Nexus"
The cultural tendency to treat science fiction as a roadmap has led to a phenomenon described by some observers as the "Torment Nexus" effect—the danger of ignoring the warnings embedded in a work while racing to build its most destructive inventions.
When NASA engineers use Star Trek as a shorthand for their missions, they are engaging in a shared cultural shorthand that provides motivation and gravitas to the space program. However, this also carries the risk of adopting the show’s unexamined premises. Star Trek is built on a foundation of "final frontier" expansionism. While the show frequently addresses moral complexities, its core premise of infinite, colonial-style expansion is rarely subjected to the same rigor as its technical specs.
If we continue to view these stories as blueprints for the future, we fail to ask the hard questions:
- Do we have the ethical right to claim extraterrestrial resources?
- Are we prioritizing "Planet B" while failing to solve the crises destroying "Planet A"?
- How do we ensure that we are building a future of equality and peace, rather than simply perfecting the hardware of our past mistakes?
Implications for a Spacefaring Future
As the Artemis program moves closer to establishing a sustained human presence on the Moon, the references to Verne become more frequent. He is no longer just an author; he is a permanent fixture in the history of space exploration. But this legacy should serve as a caution, not a justification.
When we look at the history of the Space Race, we see that it was not a purely scientific endeavor—it was a manifestation of the Cold War, a contest of ideologies and military might. Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club was similarly motivated by a post-Civil War vacuum of power and a desire for prestige. The parallels are not evidence of a "prophecy" coming true; they are evidence of the recurring, deeply human patterns of power, politics, and ambition.
To truly honor the legacy of science fiction, we must move beyond the "prophet" narrative. We should stop asking, "What did this author predict?" and start asking, "What was this author warning us about?" By re-evaluating the works of visionaries like Verne, we can shift our focus from the gadget to the societal shift. We can move away from the blind pursuit of technological progress for its own sake and toward a more thoughtful, ethical engagement with the tools we create.
Jules Verne remains a relevant guide for the spacefaring age, not because he looked into a crystal ball, but because he understood that no technology exists in a vacuum. Every moonshot, every submarine, and every AI system is a political project. By recognizing this, we ensure that we are the masters of our tools, rather than the subjects of an "inevitable" future we never chose.
Layla Zulfa
Ali Ikhwan
