About book The Meteor Hunt: The First English Translation Of Verne's Original Manuscript (2006)
As minor Verne goes, this is one of the better ones I have read lately. Verne's usually feeble humor ismore effective because it is more logically tied into the plot. Two rival American astronomers find a meteor which goes into orbit around the earth. The meteor turns out to me made of gold. An absentminded scientist applying what sounds like a prototype of Einstein's mass to energy conversion develops a machine that will knock the meteor out of its orbit onto the earth. The nations of the world hold a conference with debates about who owns the meteor, how its wealth should be divided, etc. (This reminded me of some of the manipulations in Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". ) Meanwhile the meteor's orbit is distortedbecause the inventor went off on a holiday and his landlady has been moving his machine around to dust the room (The editor of my edition points out in an afterword that this should not have had the effect Verne describes, but it is still funny.)The inventor returns and sees to it that the meteor does land on ground he has purchased in Greenland...Spoiler Warning: This gives away the endingFinally, the inventor is persuaded to use a variant of his invention to push the meteor into the sea, where it explodes, and life returns to normal, but not before the inventor's banker has made a fortune speculating in gold mining shares (as a bear when the meteor is coming down, as a bull when he knows it will be sunk).I liked this book because the science is more central to the story and there is a lower proportion of irrelevanthumor, though there is some I omitted (a couple of minor romances).
A meteor is headed straight for our planet...and it's made of pure gold! Who will get rich: one person or everyone? Who is it going to be named after? Where is it going to land?The above may sound like a tag-line or synopsis for an upcoming sci-fi/comedy flick, but it's actually a description of The Meteor Hunt, a novel written well over a century ago by Jules Verne, who also wrote well-known science fiction classics such as Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the the Earth. The Meteor Hunt is a satirically comedic farce with such a wise-cracking narrator, you can almost imagine an A-list actor/comedian (i.e., Eric Idle or Rowan Atkinson) reading it. It pokes fun at everything from short-lived marriages to greediness, and I imagine Mr. Verne had fun while writing it. Although The Meteor Hunt was written eons ago, it (or, at least, the translation I read) has a very modern feel, almost as if it were written two decades ago instead. Fans of old literature who think they've read all of the classics will definitely find enjoyment in The Meteor Hunt.
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Excelente novela de Verne, considerado entre los "apócrifos". lo mejor es, definitivamente, el personaje de "Zéphyrin Xirdal" -que, supuestamente, fue creado por Michel Verne, el hijo de Jules. Mas allá de las controversias al respecto, este excéntrico personaje, a pesar de los duros epítetos que le prodiga el autor (quienquiera que sea), es sencilamente entrañable, siendo muy fácil además identificarse con él, con su envidiable apego a la vida libre de preocupaciones y con su aún más envidiable posibilidad de llevarla a cabo, claro está.
—Juan Carlos Santillán
Written late in his career, The Chase of the Golden Meteor did not represent the optimism that Jules Verne felt earlier. Imagine a huge meteor made of solid gold in earth's orbit. Two amateur astronomers in Whaston, Virginia discover the bolide at almost exactly the same moment -- and much of the plot of this somewhat disappointing novel relate to their almost cosmic pigheadedness. At the same time, a French inventor named Zephyrin Xirdal finds a way to make the bolide come down to earth in a place which he buys and occupies so that HE can claim the gold.What happens is an interesting surprise, which I do not wish to divulge, but which endeared the novel to me ... somewhat. Unfortuanately, long before you get to that point, you will have had a snootful of the amateur astronomers and their mutual antipathy.
—Jim
