Memory forgives a multitude of literary sins. Middling prose, wooden characterization, boilerplate dialogue—all of these will be overlooked, if a writer can only seize upon one great story and carry it off reasonably well. James Fenimore Cooper's novels are bathed in bathos and bad writing, but he has survived two centuries of critical disdain because of five thrilling words: The Last of the Mohicans. H. Rider Haggard churned out 69 books that are forgotten by everyone save scholars of Victorian arcane—but King Solomon's Mines ensured his immortality even so. Bram Stoker wrote 12 terrible novels, but nobody cares, because the thirteenth was Dracula.

Then there is Jules Verne. He is remembered by the critics as "the father of science fiction" and hailed for his uncanny technological forecasts: submarines and skyscrapers, rocket ships and long-range missiles. But in the popular imagination, it doesn't matter much anymore that Verne wrote about space flight 90 years before it happened, or that his descriptions of a deep-diving submarine inspired inventors to improve upon the primitive designs of the 1860s. What endures are his stories, not his prophecies: Phileas Fogg racing around the world and against the clock; Captain Nemo, the deep-sea revolutionary, plotting his course through depths where even Ahab feared to tread.

Without a Fogg or a Nemo to carry the reader along, prescience turns quickly to pedantry, and the thrill of science fiction gives way to the tedium of the lecture hall. Nothing proves this point so well as The Begum's Millions, one of four Verne novels recently translated for Wesleyan's Early Classics of Science Fiction series. Penned in 1879, after the success of his "voyages extraordinaires"—Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and From the Earth to the Moon—had made his reputation and his fortune, The Begum's Millions belongs on the kind of college syllabus that privileges "historically interesting" books over good ones. It's as prescient, in its way, as anything else Verne wrote, but its predictive power doesn't make it any easier to slog through.

The idea is promising enough: a fabulously wealthy Anglo-Indian grandee dies without an heir, and after various investigations and negotiations by a hard-nosed English solicitor named Sharp, the Begum's fortune is divided between two academics, one German and one French. But as soon as the two protagonists are introduced, it's clear that Verne is primarily interested in refighting the Franco-Prussian War, this time on grounds of his own creation. Dr. Sarassin, the Frenchman, is an absentminded idealist, "one of those individuals who, at first glance, prompts people to say: 'There's a fine fellow.'" The German, Dr. Schultze, is a toothy demon, a man "whose appearance was obviously disturbing and off-putting for others, a state of affairs which visibly satisfied the professor." (Just in case we've missed the point, Schultze is found at work on a paper entitled "Why are All Frenchmen Stricken in Different Degrees with Hereditary Degeneration?")

The high-minded Frenchman and the brutish German decide to use their fortunes to build model cities in the trackless wilderness of the American northwest. Sarassin's France-Ville is conceived as a "City of Well Being," a meticulously planned, hypersanitary prefiguration of the dreary socialist fantasia that Edward Bellamy would conjure up a decade later in Looking Backward (another book that languishes unread on countless college syllabi). Schultze's city, on the other hand, is closer to Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Christened Stahlstadt, the City of Steel, it's a grim and hierarchical factory town, with a central garden where the sinister German doctor relaxes and plans out his ever-more-elaborate war machines. These weapons are to be turned on France-Ville, which is to be annihilated as an object lesson in German superiority—and because Schultze, in fine Nietzschean style, considers himself "especially designated by the constantly creative and destructive force of Nature to wipe out the pygmies rebelling against it."

It gives nothing away to reveal that this dark design is foiled, as much by the inherent weaknesses of Schultze's own totalitarian mindset, which refuses to admit the possibility of error, as by a handsome young Alsatian (of French ancestry, needless to say) named Marcel, who slips into Stahlstadt as a double agent and uncovers the details of Schultze's plot. (He also succeeds in winning the hand of Sarassin's lovely daughter, in a painfully tacked-on subplot—so patently extraneous, in fact, that Verne feels the need to preface its happy resolution by remarking that "perhaps, in the course of this narrative, the personal lives of those who play the hereoes have not been discussed enough. That is just one more reason for us to return to them now and provide more details about them.") France-Ville is saved, Stahlstadt is delivered into the merciless hands of its creditors—the scene at the San Francisco stock exchange is one of the more amusing in the book—and French humanism and idealism triumph over German efficiency and racialism.

As pure futurism, this plot isn't half-bad: indeed, some of the very things that make The Begum's Millions such a snooze to read also make it surprisingly prescient. The caricature (one cannot call him a character) Schultze is tedious and one-dimensional, but then again it was exactly this mix of power-worship and mad racial theories that produced National Socialism, and the Nazi movement's leadership included many variations on the Schultzian theme. The Begum's Millions may be an implausible polemic, but then the whole history of 1930s Germany was just as implausible: if the past hadn't already happened, we would never believe it.

The novel gets other 20th-century details right as well. No totalitarian City of Steel was built just east of Oregon, but Stahlstadt-like nightmares dot the plains of many totalitarian states, and the dark satanic smokestacks of Schultze's utopia conjure up images of Magnetegorsk. The German doctor's weaponry, too, has a whiff of the Cold War about it. Verne didn't predict the advent of nuclear weapons, precisely, but a long-range cannon whose shells "carry fire and death to a whole city by covering it with a shower of inextinguishable flames" comes impressively close.

    And then there is France-Ville itself, where Verne's descriptions of regimented social planning anticipate all the blinkered, well-meaning urban planners of the 20th century. Describing the housing regulations of Sarassin's city, Verne first explains that the city's governing committee "did not claim to impose any standard design of a house ƒ on the contrary, they were opposed to all insipid and boring uniformity." But this admirable statement of architectural freedom is followed by a hilariously rigid ten-point set of rules, whose strictures include the admonition that all roofs must be "slightly inclined in four directions, covered with asphalt, edged with a cornice"; that "no house shall have more than three stories"; that "kitchens and related rooms" must be "situated on the upper floor"; and that while "the layout of the interior rooms is left to the individual's desire ƒ those two dangerous sources of disease—veritable hotbeds of miasma and poison—are absolutely forbidden: carpets and wallpaper."

This is the idealism of the health inspector, the freedom of the housing project, the democracy of rule-by-experts. But Verne isn't in on the joke: he seems to really believe in Sarassin's model city, and in his credulous utopianism the book's last chance of being interesting slips away. After wading through agonizing love scenes, detailed descriptions of Stahlstadt's smelting process, and wearying anti-Teutonism (including the appearance, as Schultze's henchmen, of two bearded German giants straight out of Wagner), the reader waits in vain for some hint that Verne might go a step further in his cautionary tale and recognize not only the perils of modern technology wedded to malign intentions but the possibility that good intentions, too, might have terrible consequences.

It's the genius of the greatest dystopias, from Brave New World to Fahrenheit 451, that their nightmare worlds have been built by Sarassins seeking the betterment of humanity, not by Schultzes bent on domination. This insight is conspicuously missing from The Begum's Millions, a parable about the perils of modernity that doesn't go far enough into the darkness, and ends instead with a falsely comforting conclusion. For all his farsightedness, Verne failed to see the deeper danger of the age then dawning, a danger we're still wrestling with today—that technology corrupts the hearts of men as surely as men's hearts corrupt technology.

Ross Douthat is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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