Right now, I'm making my way through Mysterious Island. In it, some Union prisoners of war escape Richmond by balloon and are blown by a hurricane all the way into the southern Pacific where they land on an island. There, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they set about providing themselves with shelter, pottery, tools and more.
Each thing must be constructed from the previous thing and therein lies the applied science. Jules Verne clearly knew a great deal of chemistry, ca 1875, and I'm fascinated by the ways in which things like sulfuric acid can be distilled with what we would consider primitive appliances.
When I read books like this, I want to try it for myself and see how it would work. What I lack is the applied knowledge of the time. If you lived in 1875, you certainly were a great deal handier than we are today. At home, I need power tools to do just about any job. Imagine living without power tools at all.
One of the characters, all of whom are ramrod-straight, cardboard cutouts of humans, is Herbert and he's a young, amateur naturalist. His discoveries have an innocent charm to them, as if Tim was writing his insect blog without the aid of anything more than a very old set of encyclopedias. Imagine the excitement of leaving the inadequate, written word behind and blazing trails in the field of biology yourself. Wondrous!
From there, I reread Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, but that's a subject for a different blog post.
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| A Sphinx Moth? I think not! It would be named Tim's Flutterer, Hyles eisele. |
3 comments:
Have you finished "Mysterious Island"? I was going to leave a comment, but then realized that it would be a pretty big spoiler if you weren't finished yet.
(it feels kind of weird to be worried about spoilers for a book that's coming up on 150 years old, but that's how it goes sometimes)
I saw the movie, so I already know the spoiler, but not how it's revealed in the book. I should be done in a day or two.
OK, I don't think this will spoil anything you don't already know.
I think that Verne lost track of when he set this story. It is obviously taking place immediately after the civil war, which places it just before the time period where he explicitly sets "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". But, at the end, it is obvious that, for things to work out, it must be on the order of 20 years or more after the events of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". I think that what most likely happened was that Verne forgot that he had set the book in the past, and wrote the ending as if it was happening at the same time he was writing the book. Although, it is maybe a bit more amusing to work out ways to make the time work:
1. They were on the Mysterious Island a lot longer than was suggested in the book;
2. Their balloon went through some sort of time warp that threw them a few decades into the future in addition to carrying them most of the way around the world; or
3. Nemo has a time machine.
Personally, I'm rooting for option #3.
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