‘Non, je ne peux pas dire que je sois particulièrement emballé par la science’: not the kind of remark one might naturally associate with Verne. And yet, when interviewed in 1893, this is how the author sums up his position.

Given the general perception of Verne's work and the almost universally accepted assumption that his novels may be categorized as science fiction or, at the very least, fictions grounded in science, Verne's 1893 comment necessarily seems enigmatic. We might even be tempted to see it as a piece of senilia, although the author's general health in 1893 was not really in question; the first serious symptoms of the diabetic illness which Verne suffered from in the last years of his life not appearing until 1895. Moreover, his intellectual vigour at the time can scarcely be questioned: 1893 was a busy year in terms of composition and publication. No: Verne may love science ‘un peu’, but certainly not ‘passionnément’ and the aim of the following discussion is to show that Verne, far from singing the unqualified praises of positivism and progress, is actually writing against science, à rebours, indeed, of smug Second Empire and—subsequently—Third Republic scientific orthodoxy.

Science fiction, after all, is a blanket term all too easily thrown over Verne's work. The titles of recent critical literature on the author can still tend to reinforce this reading, and, although understandable to the extent that the Voyages extraordinaires are packed with all manner of contraptions and imagined machines—some of which accurately prefigure more modern counterparts—the reflex is none the less misleading. At the opposite end of the scale, one recent assessment of Verne rejects categorically the view of him as science-fiction writer: ‘contrairement à l'idée reçue, Verne ne cherche à anticiper sur son époque. L'avenir n'intéresse pas l’écrivain, et l'anticipation n'est pas son fait’. Even if we do not follow Picot all the way in rejecting, out of hand, the importance of utopianism in Verne's work, it has to be said that other labels, although nearer the mark by virtue of their less strict categorization—'littérature conjecturale’, ‘roman d'anticipation’—are equally apt to skew our approach.