I've been trying to get into Jules Verne because he's supposed to be the greatest fiction author of all time, everyone references him and loves him, but I'm having a really hard timeI finished Journey to the Centre of the Earth which was decent, even if nothing really happened and they never actually got to the centre.But then I started reading 20,000 Leagues and it's just so utterly dry, ironically for a story about the ocean, and just hyper autistic and detailed with fish descriptions and fish facts. What am I missing with the Vernester?
>>24798544The appeal is understandable only if you loved Verne between the ages of eight and ten.
>>24798544He's grandfathered in as a great. just like video games, some authors just do not age wells while others are eternally botoxed.
>>24798567>>24798587I read around the world in 80 days recently and thought it was a fun book (the descriptions can get a little verbose though)
>>24798544https://www.lib.ru/STERLINGB/catscan01.txt
>>24798781>solitary orgies...wut?
>>24798781Well that was a whole lotta nothingYou wasted 5 minutes of my life and I want them back
>>24798544> hyper autistic and detailed with fish descriptions and fish factsI feel like this is similar to the whining about whale facts in Moby Dick. You have an explosion of readership in the 1800s but there's no fucking wikipedia, no Jaques Costeau documentaries - what the hell does your reader know about the ocean and fish? Likely nothing. About fishing and whaling? Probably nothing. The ones who do know aren't likely to be your readers anyway.I think it's about equivalent to how some scifi goes out of its way to explain what being in zero gravity is like or how relativistic speeds would fuck up navigation or space combat. If you zoom ahead 200 years and everyone's taking a shuttle to Mars this would probably come across as trivial bullshit or even condescending to have to explain shit that everyone knows.Well, you're in the future relative to Verne and you have access to all kinds of information he and his readers did not. Learning fish facts and thinking about submarines was a cool futuristic thing once.
>>24798870I know, and people say the same thing about old games and old movies, the "bro just cast your mind back bro" but I find it impossible in some cases
>>24798657I have something to admit. I never read Verne. I just applied a general rule to an indevigual I have no direct experience with. He may in fact be good. I like wordy authors like Jack vance who is the king of wordy words for the sake of wordy words.
>>24798874>old gamesSome videogames are still good>old moviesMany old movies are still great.This medium hasn't changed that much after the advent of sound, it turns out. I mean, we have colors now but still.
