What price Utopia?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, utopias, dystopias

Should you inherit a half billion, or win it in a State lottery, what would you do with it? The two folks I know who won millions in the lottery say they are heartily sorry they every bought the Lotto ticket...but I don't notice them giving it back. The one near-billionaire I know, who happens to have earned it, building a huge fortune from a merely large family fortune, is a modest fellow, having no utopian pretensions.

In his 1879 classic Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum Jules Verne contrives to endow two men, both scientists but one French, the other German, with equal shares in a half-billion-franc fortune. Each decides to build a city. So far, so good.

The French doctor Sarrasin, a student of hygiene, obtains a large tract of land in Oregon and establishes France-Ville as a healthful, industrious place, and example to the world. The German chemist Schultze, seemingly in a piece of me-too-ism, obtains a similar plot ten leagues (about 30 English miles) distant, where he establishes Stahlstadt (Steel City), where his workers make superior cannons; he jump-starts the international weapons trade, mid-Victorian style. His passion is to first show up the French city, then to destroy it, with an enormous new weapon of his invention. To give away a portion of the ending: a laboratory accident results in Dr. Schultze being flash-frozen, bringing Stahlstadt to a halt. I guess Verne found this a simpler solution than having the French rapidly invent a counter-weapon.

The English title is The Begum's Millions. This 2005 re-translation by Stanford L. Luce is published by Wesleyan University Press, in their "early classics of science fiction" series. Reading the apparatus (Arthur B. Evans, ed.), the value of a more accurate translation is clear. The earlier English edition by Kingston is more of an overly-colloquial paraphrase.

The editor makes much of the actual oppressiveness of both cities. Though France-Ville is intended as a happy, healthful place, the hygienic environment is attained at the expense of numerous rules most folks would find intrusive. However, this aspect doesn't really come out in the text. There is but one chapter that describes France-Ville, in the form of a newspaper article told from a German viewpoint. Most of the book is taken up with the story of a young Frenchman (an Alsatian) who infiltrates Stahlstadt to learn of the secret weapons and plans. He poses as a Swiss engineer (to explain his accent), and gains Schultze's confidence. As Verne states in his correspondence, Schulteze's city is "more interesting" than Sarrasin's.

With this novel, Jules Verne began to express his political fears. His first, unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century was very negative, and he had to publish a number of more cheerful books to attain the stature that allowed him to present cautionary material later in his career. From his correspondence, he also grew more pessimistic with age. I find his career similar to Mark Twain's, in the growing pessimism and black humor of his later days (and I find even the relatively early work "A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" quite appalling, in the "hero's" annihilation of some 30,000 armored knights).

Verne was as prescient in his fears as he was in his science. The German-French antipathy filled the world with war for fifty years. Though a side effect was to effectively force the U.S. to become a superpower, it also did so for the Russia of Lenin and Stalin. I find the juxtaposition of the US and USSR too uncomfortably close to that of France-Ville with Stahlstadt! And the end of the "Cold War" and destruction of the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall came about as a denouement nearly as fanciful as the sudden freezing of Schultze.

I have to say it: the Berlin Wall came down on my birthday...I was on my way to work, driving alone instead of in the pool van. When the announcement came over the radio, I pulled off the road and cried a long time. I could still taste the sense of immense betrayal I'd felt at age 14 when the Wall was built. The tremendous relief I felt that day still makes me teary.

Makes me wonder if Verne got hold of Wells's time machine...