The Laboratory of the Mind’s Eye: Scientific Romance as Thought Experiment and Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages

ABSTRACT:This paper proposes a theoretical framework for the scientific romance as a thought experiment. Following Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s account of the rise of experimentation as a collective practice that can occur either physically or in the virtual space of print, it suggests that scientific romance is such a “laboratory of the mind’s eye.” With the rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century, technoscience drastically reshaped human life and became a collective concern; drawing a parallel between two collective virtual spaces newly constituted through print at this moment—the imagined community of the nation and the imaginary spaces of fiction—it argues that the scientific romance emerged in this period as a collective virtual laboratory for the nation to interrogate the role of techno-science in its shared life. Using Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages as a case study, I suggest that his adoption of scientific discourses positions his novels as experimental records that document examinations of the social effects of technoscience within a virtual laboratory. I then read Verne’s 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror as a manifesto in favor of just such a model of collective experimentation.