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calculated to estrange the reader from his environment, nor a hoax playing upon the reader's gullibility toward a magically omnipotent science. The voyages that Verne describes are equally as believable as but more glamorous than the everyday Europe and North America where it begins and ends. Its time is exactly measured and wholly filled by traversing and mapping of space. All the numerous scientific dilemma's (that, for instance, about the Earth's inner heat), red herrings, puzzles, and cryptograms are finally clarified and solved. In that sense, Verne's SF draws its excitement from the prestige of the mid-nineteenth-century scientific method by which Cuvier reconstituted a mastodon from one bone, and in turn popularises it. [French naturalist who founded the science of palaeontology and made pioneering studies in comparative anatomy and classification].

The world of Verne's books is, accordingly, more interpolated
into than extrapolated from the imaginative space of textbooks of exotic geography, zoology, mineralogy and similar, which he quotes at lengths. Verne's SF is in a way the triumph of imaginative cartography, of the great measuring adventure of mankind which succeeded in quantifying the planisphere, the flow of time and human relationships.

Verne's voyages fill in the white spots of already sketched space. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and All Around the Moon (1870) the Moon is never reached; the same is true, with one exception, of all the privileged cartographic points in other novels. Verne's innovations (the lava lift', the Moon projectile and the Nautilus, the human time-binding machine Phileas Fogg) may be stimulating technical dreams but they are infirm scientific extrapolation, on the one hand just one step beyond existing blueprints and on the other tending toward the inexact or even the grossly unscientific (humans could not survive the lava lift!). But all these innovations are vehicles of an
epic of communication for the age of industrial liberalism. Verne's fiction on the whole can be seen as a logical extension of the engineering mentality of the Age of Steam.

Verne is the last SF writer who believes in industrialist euphoria. Rather than a precursor of the twentieth century, he is the last happy' SF writer who introduced technology into the heart of utopianism and tried to harmonise most of the social changes of his time. Nostalgically, the reader sees Verne's world-view which is neither critical, nor tragic, nor clouded with

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