In agreement with Jacques Noiray, we can well sense a degree of lucid selfcomment in Verne's remark on his ingenious master electrical-engineer Orfanik in Le Château des Carpathes, who in fact invents nothing new but ‘ne s'occupait que de compléter les découvertes qui avaient été faites par les électriciens pendant ces dernières années, à [sic] perfectionner leurs applications, à en tirer les plus extraordinaires effets’. Orfanik is an artist, extracting the ‘extraordinaire’ (in implicit reference to Verne's global title, the Voyages extraordinaires) from established and inherited science, transmuting existing technology by the force of the imagination. Similarly, the mining engineer Cyprien Méré in L'Etoile du sud who tries—by the most modern methods he can muster—to make artificial diamonds, turns out not to be the true artist, the true alchemist of the novel, a role reserved for Jacobus Vandergaart (J. V. like his author), the stone-cutter who takes what already exists and transforms it into something extraordinary by the sheer skill of his art.

If Verne does not—as is now well known and fully acknowledged by critics—substantially anticipate the future, his ‘inventions’, and machines being based on existing and sometimes even already outdated technology, his real relationship to what we know today as science fiction lies in the peculiar ability of his imagination to project a personal cosmos, an alternative universe, often exploiting that limited technology but to poetic rather than scientific or even didactic effect, to create what Patrick Grainville has neatly called a ‘Univerne’. In fact, Verne rarely sets his novels in an era later than his own; some of the posthumous stories, of dubious authorship, are exceptions, as is L'Ile à hélice placed because of the gigantism of its conception in the twentieth century, but in general we must agree with Noiray again that ‘il semble que l'imagination de Jules Verne ait eu le plus grand mal à se représenter l'avenir’. Instead, Verne constructs an imaginary world that coexists but does not coincide with the real, contemporary world, and in this ‘et non par sa technologie désuète et trompeuse, se trouve le véritable point commun entre l’“Univerne” et la Science-fiction la plus moderne’.