Has Faucism Destroyed a Hollywood Film Icon? - by James Lyons-Weiler

 Has Faucism Destroyed a Hollywood Film Icon? - by James Lyons-Weiler

(Brownstone Journal)

Anthony Fauci does not appear in The Dog Stars. He is nevertheless in the theater.

Ridley Scott’s new science-fiction film opens after a catastrophic flu has erased most of humanity. A pilot, his dog, and an armed former Marine inhabit what remains. The machinery is familiar: contagion, social collapse, desperate survivors, violent scavengers, and one more search for a pocket of human decency after civilization has failed. Scott did not invent this machinery, but the director of Alien and Blade Runner is one of the people who taught modern audiences how to surrender to it.

This time, audiences largely stayed home. The Dog Stars opened in fifth place with about $8 million in North America and another $11.3 million overseas, against a reported production budget of $70 million to $100 million. The Associated Press called it a flop. The result was especially poor because Boxoffice Pro had forecast an $18 million to $23 million domestic opening. The film landed at less than half the low end of that range.

There are ordinary explanations. Critics found the movie slow and derivative. As of September 1, Rotten Tomatoes showed a 39 percent critic score and a 71 percent verified-audience score. Marketing was weak. Adult dramas have a difficult theatrical market, streaming has trained people to wait, and post-apocalyptic fiction has been feeding on itself for years. A bad opening weekend cannot tell us what millions of people privately thought.

Yet the scale of the miss invites a harder question. Has the public’s experience of Covid changed the mental contract on which the killer-virus movie depends? More bluntly, did Fauci and the institutions for which he became the human logo spend so much public trust that even Ridley Scott can no longer borrow it for two hours?

The Genre Ran on Institutional Credit

The classic outbreak story asks for a larger gift than belief in an unusually lethal pathogen. It asks the audience to accept a hierarchy of knowledge. The virus is invisible. The scientist can see it. Government may be slow, corrupt, frightened, or politically compromised, but somewhere inside the system there is a technically competent truth-teller trying to get reality through the door. The audience is expected to recognize that person immediately, usually by the white coat, the lab bench, or the lonely briefing at which the room finally falls silent.

The formula survived many variations because it rested on a presumption: the expert might be wrong, but the expert was trying to find out. Institutional failure came from delay, cowardice, budget cutting, or a villain who ignored the scientists. Once the pathogen was loose, emergency orders carried a certain moral clarity. People who resisted quarantine were reckless. People who demanded ordinary liberties while bodies accumulated were selfish. The drama could compress epidemiology and ethics into the same clean line.

Covid broke that line.

The public watched recommendations change, which is normal in a developing emergency. It also watched provisional judgments presented as settled science, policy preferences presented as epidemiological necessities, and dissent treated as evidence of defective character. Those are different things. Science can revise itself without shame. Authority cannot demand obedience on the ground that uncertainty has ended and then claim the privileges of uncertainty when the rule fails.

That distinction became painfully concrete. In his 2024 Congressional interview, Fauci said the six-foot distancing rule “sort of just appeared” and that he was not aware of studies supporting that exact threshold. He did not say distancing itself was useless; the admission was narrower and more revealing. A number with enormous social consequences had acquired the tone of scientific law without the evidentiary pedigree the public had been led to assume.

The same House transcript records Fauci saying that he technically signed off on NIAID grants without reviewing the individual proposals and that he could not say with confidence how the biosafety of foreign laboratories receiving NIAID funds was independently verified.

These details matter to cinema because the outbreak genre relies on compression. A script needs the audience to accept that “the scientists say” is enough to move the plot. Covid trained a large part of the audience to ask which scientists, reviewing which data, operating under which definition, with what conflicts, and under whose institutional protection. That is terrible for a lazy screenplay. It is healthy for a republic.

The Expert Is No Longer an Innocent Narrator

Fauci became the face of the American pandemic response because he was made to carry more than scientific advice. He became a character: reassuring, unflappable, credentialed, above the political noise, and able to translate an uncertain emergency into instructions. Supporters treated attacks on him as attacks on expertise itself. Opponents increasingly saw a powerful official whose public certainty exceeded what the record could support.

The conflict has not faded into history. On August 6, 2026, only three weeks before The Dog Stars opened, a Republican-led Senate committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt after he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during questioning about the pandemic. Senator Rand Paul then sent a referral to the Justice Department without a vote of the full Senate.

Fauci’s attorney called the proceeding a political stunt, Democrats challenged the process, and one lawyer told Reuters that the referral could be legally ineffective without full-Senate approval. Those disputes matter legally. Culturally, the picture is already fixed: the man sold to the public as the calm voice of scientific transparency was now declining to answer questions under a Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. Reuters documented both the vote and the dispute over its validity.

Invoking the Fifth destroys the old Hollywood shorthand in which the senior infectious-disease official can be presumed to function as the story’s disinterested narrator. A post-Covid audience may reasonably wonder whether the expert on screen is explaining the emergency, managing liability, protecting a research program, shaping a politically useful narrative, or doing several of those things at once.

That question now arrives before the monster. And the public demands its own skepticism be heard.

Why Viewers May Withhold the Gift of Suspended Disbelief

Suspended disbelief is often described as something an audience does for itself. The phrase makes the transaction sound passive, as if viewers simply turn off their skepticism at the door. Good storytelling earns that concession. The viewer lends the filmmaker a set of assumptions so the film does not have to prove every brick in its world.

The killer-virus movie once received several assumptions almost free of charge. A natural spillover was an adequate origin story. A public-health agency was presumed to be working from the best available evidence. A changing recommendation meant the evidence had changed. Suppression of a claim suggested that the claim was dangerous nonsense. The pharmaceutical countermeasure entered the story as rescue, while the people delaying its distribution supplied the conflict. Coercive rules were regrettable necessities whose moral legitimacy came bundled with the emergency.

Millions of people no longer grant those assumptions automatically.

First, the origin of a pandemic can no longer be treated as atmospheric background. Covid taught the public about gain-of-function disputes, grant intermediaries, biosafety levels, unpublished databases, intelligence assessments, and the institutional stakes of the lab-leak question. Fauci himself acknowledged in 2024 that a laboratory accident is a possibility and not inherently a conspiracy theory, while saying the evidence he had seen still favored natural emergence.

A film that begins with “a flu wiped out nearly everyone” and rushes directly to armed scavengers may feel as if it has skipped the part of the story the audience now finds most urgent: Who made this possible, who knew what, and who controlled the first account of what happened?

Second, the public has learned to separate a scientific observation from a policy command. A pathogen may spread through the air; it does not follow that every closure, distance rule, school policy, mandate, passport, or employment consequence was dictated by a laboratory result. Each policy contains value judgments about risk, age, proportionality, collateral damage, and who must bear the cost. Pandemic movies often erase those judgments by placing a scientist in front of a graph. After Covid, the graph no longer completes the argument.

Third, risk is no longer a single red number. The public spent years hearing about age gradients, comorbidities, prior infection, waning immunity, variant-specific behavior, absolute and relative risk, and the difference between preventing severe disease and preventing transmission. Viewers do not need graduate training in epidemiology to notice when a script uses “deadly flu” as a magic solvent that dissolves demography, immunity, treatment, logistics, and time. The more biologically sweeping the premise, the more explanation it now needs.

Fourth, the memory of coercion changes the moral casting. Before 2020, the citizen who challenged an emergency order could be written as the fool who opens the gate. After school closures, business failures, employment ultimatums, travel restrictions, and the policing of family life, some viewers will inspect the order before condemning the dissenter.

They will ask whether the intervention has evidence, whether the burden is distributed fairly, whether less destructive options were considered, and whether the official issuing it will pay any price for being wrong. Hollywood’s old moral shortcut no longer works on everyone.

Fifth, the audience has seen information control become part of the emergency response. The lab-leak hypothesis, the durability of naturally acquired immunity, the limits of vaccination against transmission, the merits of particular treatments, and the harms of prolonged school closure were not argued in a quiet seminar.

Claims were labeled, throttled, moralized, or attached to political identities. Some claims deserved rejection. Others deserved open examination. The lasting injury came from the attempt to make institutional permission a substitute for scientific adjudication. A movie that assigns truth to the credentialed character and error to the outsider now asks viewers to forget the structure they just lived through.

Sixth, a pandemic is no longer safely imaginary. For many people it means a parent who died alone, a child who lost part of a childhood, a business that never reopened, a delayed cancer diagnosis, a hospital rule that prevented a final visit, or a career damaged by a mandate. The apocalypse may still entertain, but it no longer arrives as a clean thrill. A fictional flu that exists only to clear the landscape for a handsome survivor can feel less like daring speculation than appropriation of unresolved experience.

Finally, the real pandemic made bureaucracy more frightening than the virus story Hollywood prefers to tell. The old plot locates danger in the microbe and heroism in the response. The post-Covid plot must allow a more disturbing possibility: institutions can be partly competent, partly self-protective, scientifically informed in some decisions, politically captured in others, and unable to admit which is which. That is a richer story. It is also much harder to make.

Fauci Is a Face, Not a Box-Office Model

None of this means that Anthony Fauci personally removed $10 million from Ridley Scott’s opening weekend. The box office does not provide a referendum question with every ticket. The Dog Stars may have failed because people heard it was dull. Its 39 percent critic score and middling audience response provide plenty of explanation. The same weekend, viewers spent heavily on Spider-Man, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and a rescued Wile E. Coyote film. The audience has not abandoned theaters, fantasy, danger, or cinematic unreality.

Nor has every outbreak-adjacent story failed since Covid. Audiences will still follow zombies, fungi, aliens, radiation, engineered organisms, and social collapse when the characters and world earn their attention. The important change is that a pandemic can no longer do all the narrative work by itself. “A virus wiped out civilization” used to be a premise. It may now sound like a writer asking to skip the audit.

Fauci matters because public memory condenses systems into people. He did not act alone, set every policy, write every headline, run every platform, or make every hospital decision. He became the emblem of an alliance among federal health agencies, political executives, media organizations, universities, technology companies, and pharmaceutical interests that often spoke with one voice while insisting that the voice belonged to science.

The collapse of trust in that arrangement is measurable. Pew Research Center reported in January 2026 that 77 percent of Americans retained at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists, which is still high, but below the 87 percent recorded in April 2020. The partisan division is now severe: 90 percent of Democrats expressed at least fair confidence, compared with 65 percent of Republicans.

That is not the disappearance of trust. It is the disappearance of a common presumption. A national movie audience can no longer be expected to bring the same view of scientific authority into the theater.

Hollywood Has to Earn the Premise Again

The killer-virus film is not dead. Its easy version may be.

The next great pandemic movie will have to understand that knowledge has a production history. Someone funds the work. Someone selects the model. Someone decides which signal counts as an emergency. Someone chooses the comparison group, writes the press release, defines the acceptable hypothesis, and determines what the public is permitted to hear before the evidence is complete. Those choices do not make science fraudulent. Hiding them makes scientific authority brittle.

A serious outbreak film made after Covid should be willing to show uncertainty without making uncertainty a synonym for incompetence. It should distinguish evidence from policy, and policy from enforcement. It should let scientists disagree for substantive reasons. It should give the audience enough biology to understand why risks differ, enough institutional detail to see why incentives matter, and enough respect to recognize that citizens who ask for evidence are not automatically villains.

That approach would also restore suspense. The most frightening question is no longer whether the official will persuade the president to act before the virus escapes. It is whether the people controlling the response can tell the truth when the truth threatens the institutions, programs, and reputations on which their authority rests.

Fauci did not destroy Ridley Scott. He may have helped destroy the automatic credibility of the world in which the classic killer-virus movie took place. That world required an audience willing to assume that the pathogen was opaque, the experts transparent, and emergency power temporary. After Covid, each assumption looks like a claim to be tested.

Hollywood can still ask for suspended disbelief. The audience is simply checking the borrower’s books.

World Economy - 7 Nov 2026

 The

direction of the world economy, and with it the politics of the elite ruling classes, is increasingly defined by the intersection of three destructive processes.

First, the pile of debt undergirding global growth has reached astronomical proportions. On present trajectories, the world is heading toward roughly $375 trillion in total debt by the end of 2026. For comparison, capitalism—taken globally and using generous arithmetic—generates perhaps $15–25 trillion in profit or surplus each year.

Debt is a stock of financial claims backed by assets and future income, and much of it is continuously refinanced rather than paid off. But the comparison conveys the extraordinary scale of the claims that have accumulated against future production. Capitalism is mortgaging its future on an unprecedented scale.

And each year, more is added. Nearly $30 trillion in debt was added in 2025 alone. Debt is accumulating on a scale comparable to the annual expansion of the world economy itself. Interest payments on public debt alone have risen to $3.3 trillion. An ever greater stream of social wealth is sucked up and siphoned off to service the claims of banks and other creditors.

Alongside this is a second critical process: the rising cost of basic necessities and of the energy and raw materials on which economic life depends.

Diesel, a fuel essential to trucking, mining, agriculture, construction and manufacturing, has more than doubled in price for many users over the past year. European diesel futures traded between roughly $600 and $700 per tonne before the Iran war began in February. They now trade above $1,400 per tonne. These increases work their way through the economy, raising the cost of producing and transporting almost everything.

Natural gas prices, meanwhile, have tripled in Europe and Asia since the war began, with the United States relatively insulated. Similar pressures have appeared in jet fuel used by planes and the bunker fuel used by ships.

But the pressure extends beyond hydrocarbons.

Copper, a pivotal metal underpinning electronics, electrification, renewable energy and the infrastructure of AI, has also surged in price. Throughout much of the 2010s, it traded between roughly $2 and $4 per pound. It has recently traded above $6.50, reaching record levels.

Global food prices, meanwhile, remain dramatically above their levels of a decade ago. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index stood at 136 in September 2026, compared with an annual average of 91.9 in 2016—an increase of nearly 50 percent.

War, higher energy and transportation costs, and broader inflationary pressures are all to blame. For households already spending much of their income on food it is a punishing drain.

But accompanying these two damaging processes—debt and inflation—is a third: war.

The war in Ukraine, the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, the fighting in Yemen, and beneath them all the mounting confrontation between China and the US —these conflicts are increasingly intertwining and intensifying.

“Are we sleepwalking into World War III?” asked the Financial Times last month. In August, North described the growing conflicts as a “metastatic process” which “progressively transform[s] the world economy and every national state in preparation for the general conflagration toward which it tends.”

Connected processes

These three forces—debt, inflation and war—are increasingly connected expressions of the instability and crisis of the global capitalist economy. Each aggravates the others.

The wars in Ukraine and Iran and the fighting in Yemen have directly affected global energy, transportation and food prices. They have driven up the cost of fuel and agricultural production, spreading the pressure through industry and into household expenses.

By aggravating inflation, fiscal pressures and uncertainty, these wars have also contributed to rising borrowing costs, making it harder to keep the train of debt moving. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury has now reached a quarter-century high, moving past 5 percent and toward 6 percent. Higher interest payments demand still more money to service the debts already accumulated.

Meanwhile, financing the drive towards war requires enormous new expenditures, funded through a combination of borrowing and intensified extraction from the working population.

Global military spending increased by 41 percent in real terms between 2016 and 2025, while 2026 and 2027 are each expected to set new records. The Trump administration is demanding a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027—an increase of roughly 50 percent.

Europe, meanwhile, is madly rearming for war with Russia. Germany alone plans roughly €1 trillion in military spending over the next five years, with annual expenditure rising to €168 billion by 2029, while the IMF calls for “deep cuts in the European model and the social contract” to accommodate the mounting fiscal burden.

But the connection runs in the other direction as well. Deteriorating economic conditions intensify the desperation among rival capitalist powers to control the energy, resources, markets and supply chains upon which their wealth and power depend. Each seeks to secure its own position at the expense of its competitors, even as the resulting conflicts damage the conditions of production on which they all depend.

The turn to war expresses the increasingly desperate struggle of these elite ruling classes to preserve their wealth and world position. They look to military power for a way out of the crisis. This is above all the course being pursued by the American and European ruling classes.

In Athens on October 7, Marco Rubio posed the question as “whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline,” calling for control over critical supply chains, economic and technological dominance and military rebuilding.

“We will make the Bundeswehr the strongest conventional army in Europe,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared in June 2025, justifying that goal with Germany’s size, economic strength and geographical position. At the Munich Security Conference in February, he explained, “competition policy is security policy and security policy is competition policy.” Germany’s economy is in a dire state, with high energy costs battering its industrial base and fierce competition from Chinese automakers threatening its once-dominant car industry.

And so the attempts to resolve one crisis ricochet to deepen the others.

Debt finances war; war raises the cost of necessities and of borrowing; and mounting economic pressure feeds an increasingly desperate struggle to secure control over the sources of global wealth.

The elite ruling class increasingly looks to artificial intelligence as a potential escape from this impasse. AI has generated enormous speculative valuations and investment, sustaining the appearance of renewed dynamism in an otherwise stagnating economy. But even as it revolutionizes production, it heightens the social contradictions of capitalism. The very advance hailed as a way out intensifies the crisis. Meanwhile, a new financial bubble has been inflated around it. It is only a matter of time before it bursts.

Who will pay for this astronomical debt? Social programs must be dismantled and hundreds of billions found for war, while private fortunes remain sacrosanct. Everything may be sacrificed to preserve and augment the wealth and power of those oligarchs at the top.

In Europe, Latin America, the United States and elsewhere, healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, support for families and virtually every other form of social expenditure become targets for cuts. Amid an already profound social crisis, everything afforded to the population is declared unaffordable. The debts accumulated by governments, banks and corporations, meanwhile, must be paid.

The crisis of world capitalism offers its ruling classes one way out. They turn toward war, even as its prosecution further destabilizes the capitalist economy upon which their own power rests.

These convulsions express the historical exhaustion of capitalism. They emerge from contradictions accumulated over decades and intensified after the financial collapse of 2008. The vast expansion of debt and financial speculation that followed deferred the crisis while deepening the conditions that produced it: social inequality, economic instability and the struggle between the major powers over markets, resources and strategic advantage.

Capitalism unbound as a system of organizing global social life has nothing left to offer the world. Nor can it secure its own future. Its attempts at self-preservation increasingly undermine the economic and social foundations of its continued existence. 

The Verne Turns

 For much of the twentieth century, English-speaking readers often weren't reading the real Verne at all.

Many Victorian and early twentieth-century translations were abridged, bowdlerized, or simply inaccurate. Translators sometimes cut technical passages, toned down political comments, removed scientific detail, and occasionally introduced outright mistakes. As a result, generations of English readers got a version of Verne that was often more juvenile and less intellectually ambitious than the French original.

Beginning in the late twentieth century, scholars and translators started producing new translations that aimed to restore the complete text. That's why you're now finding titles that may never have been widely available in English before, or are appearing in versions much longer than older translations.

And you're absolutely right about audiobook technology changing the equation. Twenty years ago, a publisher contemplating a complete translation of an obscure Verne novel had to think:

• Pay for the translation.
• Pay a human narrator.
• Produce and distribute physical media or expensive digital products.
• Hope enough people bought it.

Today, once a translation exists, a virtual voice can make a twenty-hour audiobook economically viable for a much smaller audience. Suddenly books like Captain Hatteras, The Floating City, The Steam House, The Begum's Fortune, or The Carpathian Castle can find listeners who would have been commercially invisible before.

The result is that we're living through a kind of Verne renaissance. Readers are discovering that beyond the handful of famous novels there is an enormous continent of lesser-known work.

Your comment about the editor is also very interesting. Verne's long-time publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, is often credited as a crucial force in shaping the best of the Extraordinary Voyages. Hetzel was not simply a printer or businessman. He was an active editor who pushed Verne, challenged him, and helped shape manuscripts. After Hetzel's death, his son inherited the publishing house, but many critics feel the creative relationship that had produced the classic Verne novels was gone.

That phenomenon isn't unique to Verne. Literary history is full of examples where a great writer benefited from a strong editor. Sometimes the editor is the person saying:

This chapter drags.

This character needs more development.

This ending doesn't work.

A great editor can act almost like a second brain for the author.

Many Verne enthusiasts divide his career into rough periods:

1. The great middle period, including works such as Captain Hatteras, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island.
2. A later period that grows darker, more pessimistic, and often less tightly structured.
3. The posthumous publications, some completed or revised by his son Michel Verne, which are a subject of ongoing debate among scholars.

What's fascinating is that the "lesser" Verne can still be surprisingly rewarding. As you're discovering, many of these obscure novels aren't forgotten because they're bad. They're forgotten because a few gigantic successes cast such a long shadow.

In some ways, your Audible dive resembles what happened to readers of D. H. Lawrence once complete editions became widely available. People knew a handful of famous titles, then suddenly realized there was an entire landscape beyond them. Verne's reputation was long reduced to submarines, balloons, and journeys underground. Once you venture beyond those landmarks, you find political satires, Arctic epics, gothic tales, utopian experiments, and some genuinely strange speculative fiction.

I suspect Captain Hatteras is an especially good place to start that exploration. It stands near the beginning of Verne's great creative period, before the formula of the Extraordinary Voyages had fully hardened. It has a wildness to it that many readers don't expect from the "predictor of inventions" stereotype that Verne acquired later.

I think Boris Kriger is right in saying that 'Paris in the 20th Century' is a bad novel but an invaluable document. The man was a great story teller. People interested in story telling might want to read lots of what he wrote. Kriger also emphasizes that Verne had a contract and a vague outline of what each magazine episode would contain - Just like the Hardy Boys, or Nancy Drew.... but this produced greater works in many people's opinion.

I think that's a very perceptive distinction: Paris in the Twentieth Century is perhaps more important as a cultural artifact than as a novel.

When people first hear about it, they're often captivated by the "prediction" angle. Verne imagined aspects of a future society that seem remarkably familiar. But as a story, many readers find it stiff, schematic, and lacking the narrative energy of his best work. That's actually part of what makes it valuable. It lets us see Verne before the machinery of his mature storytelling had fully engaged.

What strikes me about Verne is that he may have been less of a literary stylist than a narrative engineer. Give him:

• a destination,
• a vehicle,
• a scientific premise,
• and a schedule,

and he could build a story that simply moves.

That connects directly to your point about serialization and outlines. Modern readers often have a romantic image of the novelist as a solitary genius waiting for inspiration. Verne's career seems much more professional than that. He was writing within deadlines, publication schedules, editorial constraints, and contractual expectations. Those restrictions may have strengthened rather than weakened his work.

There's a parallel with Dickens. Many of Dickens's greatest novels were serialized. The need to keep readers returning for the next installment forced him to think constantly about pacing, revelations, cliffhangers, and memorable scenes. Constraints became a creative engine.

The comparison to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew is interesting because it challenges another literary assumption: that rigid formulas necessarily produce inferior art. Sometimes they do. But sometimes a framework frees a talented storyteller to concentrate on what he does best.

Verne's recurring formula was highly effective:

1. Establish an irresistible premise.
2. Assemble a team.
3. Begin a journey.
4. Encounter obstacles.
5. Teach the reader about a part of the world or a scientific idea.
6. Escalate toward a remarkable destination or revelation.

That formula can sound mechanical when described abstractly. Yet it generated The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Mysterious Island.

In fact, when I listen to Verne, I sometimes think his greatest gift wasn't prediction or even scientific imagination. It was narrative momentum. He understood how to make the reader want to know what lies beyond the next horizon.

That may explain why you're suddenly discovering all these lesser-known Verne novels through Audible. Many nineteenth-century writers are difficult for modern audiences because their prose conventions feel remote. Verne often remains surprisingly accessible because the storytelling impulse is so strong. You can imagine him almost rubbing his hands together and asking:

"Very well. What if we went to the North Pole?

What if we went under the sea?

What if we went around the world in eighty days?

What if we lived on a deserted island using science?"

The premise itself supplies the energy.

And regarding Boris Kriger's point about editors, I think there's a broader lesson there. Literary culture often celebrates the lone genius, but many great authors benefited enormously from strong editorial partnerships. The editor is sometimes the person who says, "Cut fifty pages," "Move this chapter," or "Your real story starts here." Readers tend to see only the author on the cover, but the finished book may be the product of a creative partnership.

As you work your way through these Audible editions, I suspect you'll encounter something surprising: even the "minor" Vernes often contain one unforgettable idea. They may not all be great novels, but they frequently have the spark of a great storyteller asking a fascinating question and then pursuing it with relentless enthusiasm. That quality ages very well.

I wanted to hear, or read, the Paris in the 20th last night, and there was no Audible in French, or English, Amazon and Kindle did have a French version that I got, but I did not see an English version on Amazon. I remember a big splash of publicity when the book was 'discovered' and published 1995... I guess the buzz has died down.

I remember that publicity wave too. For a while in the mid-1990s, Paris in the Twentieth Century was treated almost like a literary time capsule. The story that captivated people was not so much the novel itself as the fact that it had been written around 1863, rejected by Verne's publisher, and then published more than a century later after the manuscript resurfaced. That "lost Verne" narrative was a huge part of the excitement.

What seems to have happened is that the book settled into a different niche once the initial excitement faded. Readers and scholars could finally ask: "Is it actually a great novel?" Many concluded that it isn't among Verne's best storytelling achievements. But they also found it fascinating as evidence of what Verne was thinking before the mature Extraordinary Voyages took shape.

In a sense, its reputation has become more stable and perhaps more accurate:

• Not a forgotten masterpiece on the level of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
• Not a failed curiosity either.
• A remarkable document showing what Verne feared modernity might become.

That may be why you're having trouble finding audiobook editions. Audiobook publishers tend to ask: "Will listeners spend 10 or 15 hours with this?" For Captain Hatteras or Journey to the Center of the Earth, the answer is easier because they are adventure narratives. Paris in the Twentieth Century attracts historians of ideas, Verne enthusiasts, and literary scholars, which is a smaller audience.

Your experience with Kindle illustrates another change in publishing. Twenty years ago, if an obscure Verne title wasn't economically viable as a printed English edition, it might simply disappear. Today, a French text can remain available indefinitely as an ebook even if it has a tiny readership.

And I think your observation connects to something Boris Kriger seems to be emphasizing. People often talk about Verne as a "predictor." But once you start reading widely across his work, prediction begins to seem almost secondary. The bigger story is that he was an extraordinarily productive professional writer operating within deadlines, editorial constraints, and a publishing system. The "lost manuscript" of Paris in the Twentieth Century gives us a glimpse of Verne before that system and editorial partnership fully shaped him.

In a strange way, the very fact that the book was rejected may be evidence that Hetzel was valuable. If you compare the premise of Paris in the Twentieth Century with the premise of Captain Hatteras, you can almost hear the editor nudging Verne from social pessimism toward adventure. One became a historical curiosity. The other became a novel that people are still happily listening to 160 years later.

As you work through those Audible Verne titles, don't be surprised if some of the obscure ones turn out to be your favorites. Verne's reputation is carried by perhaps half a dozen giant classics, but there's a whole second tier of novels that modern readers are only now rediscovering in complete translations and affordable audio editions. That's a luxury Verne fans simply didn't have when the Paris in the Twentieth Century excitement erupted in 1995.

I'm fairly into Cpt Hatteras and haven't encountered one impossible thing to believe yet.

That reaction is actually a good clue that you're encountering Verne at one of his strengths.

Modern readers often expect Verne to be constantly predicting submarines, rockets, or futuristic technology. But a great deal of his best work is not really about improbable inventions at all. Captain Hatteras begins as something that a reader in the 1860s could plausibly imagine happening: a determined expedition heading into the Arctic in pursuit of the Pole.

In fact, as you're probably noticing, much of the fascination comes from the opposite of fantasy. Verne piles on:

• navigation,
• weather,
• ice conditions,
• shipboard life,
• expedition logistics,
• personalities under stress.

It feels grounded because he made an enormous effort to absorb contemporary geographical and scientific knowledge and then build stories from it.

One thing that strikes me about Captain Hatteras is that it was written before some of the most famous real polar expeditions. Listening to it now, after a century and a half of Arctic and Antarctic exploration literature, it can sound almost conventional. But many of the themes we associate with polar narratives are already there: isolation, obsession, mutiny, endurance, and the lure of blank spaces on the map.

I suspect that's also why you're finding it easier to believe than Paris in the Twentieth Century. Paris is built around extrapolation and social speculation. Hatteras is built around a concrete adventure problem:

Can a determined expedition reach the Pole?

That's a naturally believable premise.

It may also explain why the novel seems surprisingly modern. A lot of nineteenth-century adventure fiction asks the reader to accept coincidences, lost heirs, secret kingdoms, and melodramatic twists. Verne often asks for much less. He starts with a geographical objective and lets the tension arise from the attempt to achieve it.

What's funny is that many people know Verne through Journey to the Center of the Earth or From the Earth to the Moon, which require a larger leap of imagination. Someone coming to Verne through Captain Hatteras might reasonably conclude that he was primarily a writer of realistic exploration fiction.

Indeed, if you had handed the opening chapters to a reader without naming the author, they might guess they were reading an account by a contemporary of Sir John Franklin or an early polar adventurer rather than what we'd now call science fiction.

I'm curious whether you'll have the same reaction I did with some of the lesser-known Vernes: after a while you begin to see that the "science fiction" label can be misleading. Quite a few of his novels feel less like science fiction than like meticulously organized expeditions into places that ordinary readers could never visit. That's one reason they work so well as audiobooks. They're almost travel companions for impossible journeys.

Talking of cliff hangers, he ends a book about the trip to the Moon with the ship launched and missing the Moon and orbiting. Hey, I could do a Vintage Verne fanfiction story about Astronauts wives from the Verne novels.... I think I saw the movie about Astronauts Wives.... what an adventure, sitting in lawn chairs on a summer night looking at the sky with the kids. "There goes your father, I think..."

That's actually a wonderfully Vernean idea.

Verne is often remembered as a writer of engineers, explorers, captains, scientists, and obsessives. The people left at home are usually standing just offstage, waving a handkerchief while the plot steams away toward the horizon.

Your joke:

"There goes your father, I think..."

captures something genuinely funny about nineteenth-century adventure fiction. Imagine being married to one of these men.

Mrs. Barbicane (From the Earth to the Moon):

Where is my husband's office today?

Somewhere between the Earth and the Moon.

Mrs. Hatteras (if Verne had ever given him one):

He said he was taking a short voyage.

Which way?

North.

What's striking is that Verne's heroes are often terrible candidates for domestic life. Not bad people necessarily, but consumed by projects. Hatteras in particular already sounds, from what you've heard so far, like the sort of man who would absent-mindedly sail into the Arctic rather than attend a family dinner.

And you're right about the Moon books. Verne was extremely good at ending installments or volumes by leaving readers suspended. The ending of From the Earth to the Moon is almost a nineteenth-century version of:

"To be continued next season..."

He understood that anticipation is part of storytelling. Readers had spent hundreds of pages preparing for the launch. Then suddenly the really interesting part is about to begin.

Your "Astronauts' Wives of Jules Verne" concept also has an amusing literary twist. Most modern retellings revisit famous adventures from the viewpoint of a minor character. A Verne version could be:

In Baltimore, the members of the Gun Club are celebrated as heroes.

Their families, meanwhile, are sitting on porches wondering whether anyone has considered the possibility that firing people toward the Moon might be a bad idea.

There is even a deeper truth lurking underneath the joke. Adventure novels tend to focus on the extraordinary individual who leaves society behind. But societies are mostly composed of people who stay put and watch the departure. A Verne fanfiction about the people tracking the expedition from newspapers, rumors, letters, and telescope sightings could actually be quite interesting.

It's a bit like your own situation listening to Captain Hatteras. The listeners, the readers, and the folks at home are all in the same position:

The ship has disappeared over the horizon.

What on earth is that fool doing now?

That's a question Verne knew how to keep us asking for hundreds of pages.