Jules Verne's Lost Novel | Hacker News Reader

Jules Verne's Lost Novel

blue-continuum.com

151 pointsdnetesn34 comments

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this book is quite poorly written. But I think it's still enjoyable, in part because you can see the hand of the author pulling the strings so much that it becomes funny. I read an annotated version with context and comments from Verne's editor, and would recommend you to do the same if you're curious.

As an example, there's an entire chapter dedicated to Michel and his professor friend going through a long list of nineteenth-century authors and passing judgment on them. You would expect this to be the thinly disguised opinions of Jules Verne, but no, it's the thinly disguised opinions of Verne's editor, which Verne included in the hopes that it would help the book get published. Obviously, this was not successful.

I have a theory about Verne that's strongly based on this book. He is sometimes called a technological visionary, but most of the inventions of his books were already known at his time (the first submarine was made in 1620, Around the World in Eighty Days is likely based on an itinerary in a magazine Verne read, etc.), and what was not known, Verne often made work using lots of artistic license (like the giant gun from the Earth to the Moon, which would kill the passengers with the acceleration; Verne did not invent rockets). No, Verne's genius was that he took the progress that was already visible and used it to create adventures, that he created a vision of the future where all this technology is used to explore deep underground caves and the sea floor and outer space and find fascinating things there. And Paris in the Twentieth Century is the negative version of this, a world where technological progress does not expand imagination, but instead limits it, as everything gets economically optimised to death. It's a good warning to keep in mind.

Case in point: Pangram says this article is 80% AI-written. [1] I only started suspecting in the very last paragraph ("Michel Dufrénoy crosses Verne's frozen Paris carrying almost nothing: a memory of books, a love of poetry, a handful of dying flowers and the name of someone he loves." is a vaguely poetic-sounding structure that I've already seen dozens of times in the last year).

Ignore the debates about quality. This means that this article's message is a lie; all of the opinions expressed here come not from a human, perhaps an inhabitant of Paris, but from a machine. The salvation suggested in the form of Parisian 1960s poets does not come from someone who likes to read them, but from a machine reporting on its training data. (Here it's not controversial -- what else can an LLM know about a poet besides what has been written about them?)

I feel like exploring a cave now.

[1] The 20% flagged as human is mostly direct quotations from the book, which is a nice sign that Pangram isn't making things up randomly.

Also note that HN seems to check comments using Pangram now, so citing LLM text (or article text that was written by an LLM) can get it (the comment) shadowbanned. In your case the citation is just a small fraction of the whole comment though.

You would think Pangram would be smart enough to factor that in no ?

It is, or at least it shows my comment as 100% human.

Combining ideas - I think it would be a cool sci fi plot point if an actual 160 year old verified manuscript was flagged as 100% AI

> At the Grand Entrepôt Dramatique, plays are assembled like manufactured goods. One clerk handles expositions, another denouements, another entrances and exits. There is a clerk for rhyming couplets, a clerk for punch lines, a Department of Puns and a central office of jokes. Art has survived as an assembly line.

While his predictions about technology were way more accurate for the 1960s (his intended target), his predictions about society and culture are prescient for the 2020's with the advent of generative AI

> "With Montaigne and maybe Rabelais it was What Do I Know? In the nineteenth century it was What Does It Matter to Me? And nowadays we say: How Much Does It Earn?"

For me, this also summarizes the introduction of the Internet to the masses, all the way to the present day.

This is eerily reminiscent of scriptwriting guides like Save the Cat with templates for story beats to the minute. I hear that Hollywood loves this kind of stuff...

THE BLAKE SNYDER BEAT SHEET

PROJECT TITLE:

GENRE:

DATE:

1. Opening Image (1): 2. Theme Stated (5):

3. Set-up (1-10):

4. Catalyst (12):

5. Debate (12-25):

6. Break into Two (25) 7. B Story (30):

8. Fun and Games (30-55):

9. Midpoint (55):

10. Bad Guys Close In (55-75):

11. All Is Lost (75):

12. Dark Night of the Soul (75-85):

13. Break into Three (85):

14. Finale (85-110):

15. Final Image (no):

Page 51 here: https://ia800109.us.archive.org/31/items/snyder-blake-save-t...

It would have been more interesting if it had been published in 1991 so as to directly invite comparison to David Brin's _Earth_ in which that author did much the same (imagine life in the future), or not until 2012 so as to be contrasted with KSR's _2312_.

Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).

The nice thing is that once it’s been published, you can re-read it at any time, and then compare it with whatever book you want. I don’t see how the publication year is really relevant, books don’t just expire after 6 months.

The context is that it was suggested as a Hugo Award Winner for the year of its release --- my comment was an effort to reframe that suggestion.

It was first published in 1994, so it was only off by a few years. I'm just surprised I only heard of the book just now

Brin’s an interesting case. In addition to his impressive bibliography (still hoping for the sentient space-exploring dolphins movie to get greenlit..), he has consulted for NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. He’s also quite vocal politically, for team blue. Last week he penned this pre-mid-terms piece on the UAP transparency topic: https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2026/10/disclosure-ufo-cults-... . Couldn’t be more critical & denigrating. I happen to disagree, but at least he’s engaging with the subject, Manhattan Project 2.0 and all, which is more than most from his side of the aisle do. (Notable standout exceptions Andre Carson and Jared Moskowitz)

First of all, I am a huge fan. I bought the book, but haven't read it yet.

I am not sure I belive the story about thr manuscript however. It surfaced just as the Internet was becoming a thing. Coincidence?

Yes, coincidence. It was submitted for publication but rejected in 1863 (and then lost in a pile of papers and re-found in 1989). Anybody familiar with e.g. how most of Tolkien’s works were published posthumously won’t be surprised. Jules Verne wrote a lot, and he did not have a Christopher to comb through the boxes of papers he left. There are 200k pages of drafts, letters and manuscripts in a museum in Nantes, and not everything ended up there.

And I don’t see why the Internet is relevant: not everything that happened since the mid-1980s are internet-related conspiracies.

I read it, and my disappointment was immeasurable, and day ruined. The novel is just bad. It seems the real story is that it was a draft which J.Vernes and his publisher discarded exactly because it was below expected quality line, and not because "prophecy implausible". Fast forward to our times, and someone decided (not without a reason) that it's possible to sell anything with J.Vernes name on it, and marketed it as a "lost manuscript" accidentally found in "family safe".

Do you know if other of his works merit the sort of effort which has gone into re-translating and correcting _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_?

I was very glad to re-read it when:

https://www.usni.org/press/books/20000-leagues-under-sea

was published.

Although Verne had written about 1960, the social situation seems to be something that could for 2060.

I read a comment elsewhere speculating that the article was written by AI. It could be, but it also shows that authors have to now go extra lengths to prove what they write is not from a machine.

I am afraid future of art is bleak. Poems hand written by poets will be competing with machines. Movies by Nolan and AI probably would not be easily distinguishable. Would we still pay for human made movies when AI can generate one for us, with the ending and style we want?

Of course there will be value to human generated content, but probably much less than how it is today. It will be probably niche like art work for millionaires to boast than for masses to consume.

In that sense, I would say Verne was right to be worried.

I don't understand the supposed value of AI-made art tailored to the viewer's wishes. One of the best film-watching experiences I've had recently was After Hours, which I got sent to by some random online article linking to a scene [1]. I would never have asked for this film or been able to describe it without having seen it. My favorite book of all time is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was forced to read in high school (balancing out all of the other nonsense they made us read) -- it's set in a small Colombian town and has about as little to do with my life (in a capital city in Central Europe) as imaginable. I love the webcomic 1/0 [2], whose author was a creationist when writing it (I found it as an insufferable atheist kid).

We find art that is fun and interesting and unexpected and it expands what we are. That's one of the purposes of art. Watching something predictable eventually gets your survival boredom instinct to kick in. Is this not a common experience?

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Iwo4-wcodpM&pp=0gcJCXICo7VqN5tD

[2] https://www.undefined.net/1/0/?strip=170

> I don't understand the supposed value of AI-made art tailored to the viewer's wishes.

Some people do not like tragic endings while they love the premise of the movie. Some have issues where violence in movies could disturb them for days. So to be able to take a premise while toning down on violence and having a happy ending would be attractive for many people. There is a reason why many hollywood movies are variations of Americans saving world with a happy ending. Movies with tragic endings or challenging preconceived notions are not going to be successful.

In that sense, we would be able to make our own offbeat movies with intersting premises, instead of watching the usual movies prefered by average movie goers.

Movies, music, art are all story telling and communicating ideas. If you’re watching a movie created by AI about the things you want to see (as opposed to using AI to create a movie about the things you want to tell), I don’t see the point.

> I am afraid future of art is bleak. Poems hand written by poets will be competing with machines. Movies by Nolan and AI probably would not be easily distinguishable. Would we still pay for human made movies when AI can generate one for us, with the ending and style we want?

If it isn't obvious already, it should become obvious soon that economics and society as a whole will need to change. People will still want to do people things, like make art for example, but the need to monetize their work will have to go away.

There are many hobbyists that do things for the pleasure of doing them, and by that definition most human activities will become hobbies, done for pleasure and the sake of doing them, not for monetary/economic value.

The (economic) grind of artists painstakingly creating scenes for The Simpsons - which is already outsourced to cheaper overseas locations - will no longer be a human domain; and as I understand it, is not even currently in the domain of US-based artists and is instead being done in South Korean animation studios [1]. Does that mean US artists have disappeared?

There are large communities that come together for non-economic activities. History re-enactors for example. So hierarchy, organization, etc. will continue, just not for pecuniary work. A potential model for this is outlined in The Culture of Iain M. Banks' sci-fi, with the idea being that eliminating the economic necessity of work does not eliminate the human desire to accomplish [2].

I prefer the rosier outlook over the dystopian one. Society could go either way. We shall see.

[1] https://responsejournal.net/issue/2024-11/feature/between-se... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

Amazing blog post! Except for the spoilers, I enjoyed the reading, thanks for sharing

I've been very disappointed in the various screen adaptations of Verne's books. The Nautilus series is unwatchable. The Mysterious Island shows are hideously bad. And so on.

> The Nautilus series is unwatchable.

I never saw it, but after reading the synopsis [1], that appears to be fortunate.

There is worse. Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel.[2] Vaguely Verne-inspired. Very vaguely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(TV_series)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wkH_dlcVSg

> The Nautilus series is unwatchable.

I found The Nautilus series to be a rather decent treatment of Verne's book, and it has a 6.8 rating on IMDB [1], and a 79% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes [2]. Would have liked to see a second season to explore Verne's exposition a bit more. Missed opportunities, I guess. Maybe AI can help tell that storyline in the future even though it may not have made sense to the studios.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15286302

[2] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/nautilus_2

I wanted something less juvenile and cartoonish. And the interiors of the submarine were improbably and absurdly large. I guess I'm just the wrong demographic for it.

Was it 'The Camera-Phone'? https://theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-the-c...

:-)

Why start the article with an AI-generated skyline of Paris? You couldn't find a real picture? Fucking hell.

It should at least have been a woodcut of the AI skyline, just like those in those blue books. We had more or less a full set of those, printed in the late 1800s/early 1900s which I voraciously read as a child. Reading 'The Children of Captain Grant' and seeing those images of Tierra del Fuego or the jungle or any of the other scenes really brought the 'pathos' of the stories alive, as if I were a Victorian setting out to see the wonders of the world. They still do for me, probably 'cause of my early experience with those books.

Here's a site - ignore the warnings about the certificate - showing some of these images: https://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/illustr/

OK, down-voter, I suppose you don't like some of my other comments and thought to 'take revenge' by down-voting anything I posted recently but, honestly, why this one? What exactly triggered you about my memories of reading Jules Verne? Don't you realise using the down-vote button in this way gives away your game? Some of you even tried to flag me yesterday, such a... sad... spectacle.

The image appears to be "Paris skyline panorama with Eiffel Tower" taken by Jan Becke.

https://janbecke.com/portfolio-item/paris/

Take from that what you will.

Most of these photos seem heavily edited with only a few showing untouched skies. Thanks for sharing!

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