Scottish Town Explores Its Past in Jules Verne’s Science Fiction

French author Jules Verne certainly did his best to imagine the future but he also wrote plenty of “contemporary” stories that today would be considered either science fiction or fantasy simply because they went beyond the mundane qualities of the known world to explore ideas of the imagination. Verne’s The Underground City (lost before his death and published in 1998) is set in a fictional contemporary Scotland.

I have not read the book, which follows the events in a Scottish mining town over the course of 10 years, where inimical things happen. The ending of the story (which I have read) could easily be found in a Harry Potter novel or Disney movie. Things work out for most of the good folk and the villain of the story is hoist on his own petard.

The City of Irvine sits on the western coast of Scotland facing the Firth of Clyde and the island of Arran. The Irvine Herald carried a story about a local researcher, John Paul Loney, who tied together references in the book to conclude that Jules Verne had enough actual knowledge of local geography and customs that he must have visited the area.

Loney was even able to pinpoint a trip which should have brought Verne close enough to Irvine and Dundonald Castle to give the writer the information (and perhaps inspiration) he required to write the book.

The study of sources and influences is a long-established literary tradition. For example, William Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in the state of Mississippi has inspired legions of researchers to tie his fiction in to real Mississippi locations and traditions. Scholars and critics generally agree the fictional county is based on Lafayette County and the town of Oxford.

The Hogwarts castle in the Harry Potter books — as well as the village of Hogsmeade — is said to be located in Scotland. However, J.K. Rowling appears to have manufactured an imaginary landscape for her Scotland venues (much as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is an imaginary past version of the Earth). The tendency to invent previously unknown regions is probably more common in adventure and science fictioney literature than in contemporary literature. That’s probably one of the criteria editors and critics use to distinguish between “literary fiction” and “fantastic fiction”.

Fictionalized accounts of real locations and fictional locations invented for literature further distinguish between types of fantastic fiction. But the use of fictional landscapes (or fictionalized real locations) goes back to ancient story-telling days when people had to rely on the descriptions passed on by other people to embed their stories in faraway lands.

The ancient Greek writers, for example, often provided considerable detail about lands occupied by peoples who are now considered to be legendary or mythical, such as the Amazons and many more far-fetched creatures. Even so, modern scholarship can identify lands associated with the myths, if not real people. Commercial interests have developed around many myths and legends.

For example, you can visit ancient Colchis in the Caucausus in what is now the Republic of Georgia, located on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Colchis is the land where Jason and the Argonauts sailed to find the golden fleece. There are credible attempts to explain what the golden fleece might have been in terms of historical cultural practices.

Fantastic landscapes abound in ancient literature and mythology. The Norse imagined a tree stretching from the depths of Hel all the way up to the heavens. Midgaard, the land of men, was surrounded by a sea that separated it from the lands of gods, elves, dwarves, and giants. The rainbow bridge stretched from Midgaard to Asgaard, the land of the Aesir (the leading gods).

Norse geography resembled the world that the ancient Scandinavians could see. Their stories were based on mountains, fjords, great bodies of water, and the occasional dark forest. As the Vikings spread out and colonized other regions their worldview changed and Midgaard became less an explanation for the world that is and more an idea of the world that men once saw.

Fiction translates what we see and hear into what we want to dream about, what we fear, what we enjoy. Fiction is a lens through which we view the world around us and there is little to separate fiction from myth in that respect. Myth is not fiction so much as interpretation. We use myth to explain the world around us.

Myth differs from science only in that science attempts to test the conclusions we draw from what we see. Mythology doesn’t invite close scrutiny, fact-finding, or refutation. But much of what we think of as ancient mythology today — particularly references to the wars, the landscapes, and the peoples mentioned in ancient myths — was once part of the bodies of science, history, and literature cherished by ancient peoples.

It is conceivable that much of we hold to be “true” today will be questioned and challenged in the future if we fail to maintain our connection with knowledge and fact through coming generations. Will Chernobyl one day be remembered as a mythical place of death and great peril? Will Pearl Harbor become a metaphor for tragic but unverifiable battles?

Science and mythology both require people to believe in them. Fiction, on the other hand, dispenses with the need for faith and belief. It’s “just pretend” so we don’t worry about if it’s true. In fact, there is a great deal of fact and truth in much of our fiction. Good fiction weaves reality into its fabric to make it more believable and credible, even though everyone knows it’s fiction and chooses not to believe it.

We appreciate the art of literary fakery because it seems so real as long as we are not fooled (or foiled) by the fakery. Art and Subtrefuge are close friends who have walked a long path together. It’s only when Art is perverted into something more diabolical that we begin to question its value to us.

Jules Verne set words to paper almost 200 years ago and started a long chain of events that continues to unfold today. He set us to thinking about what is, what could be, what should be, and why things are not the way we thought they were. He was pioneering science fiction in ways seldom credited by the media, because science fiction isn’t just about the human spirit projected into fantastic events and landscapes.

Science fiction is first and foremost supposed to be about inspiring us to think, to dream, to wonder, to question why. It is the Why that makes science fiction an important part of human experience. Asking Why helps us to separate fact from fiction, myth from science, history from legend.