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Starvard University · Science Fiction Pioneers
Meet the inventors of the submarine novel, time travel, and the alien invasion. Climb down a volcano with Jules Verne, sail twenty thousand leagues under the sea, race around the world on a bet, and then let H. G. Wells throw humanity into the far future and into the path of Mars.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Science fiction asks one question: what if this one thing were true? What if you could climb down inside the earth, live under the sea, or ride a machine into the year 800,000? Jules Verne answered with careful science and big lists of real facts. H. G. Wells answered by asking what such a change would do to people. This course lets you watch both masters work.
Verne and Wells invented science fiction between them, but they built opposite machines. Jules Verne, a Frenchman who loved geography, ships, and instruments, started from real science and pushed it one careful step further: his submarine is built from the best engineering of 1870, stretched. His books are full of distances, depths, species, and supplies, and that homework is why his futures still feel solid. H. G. Wells, an Englishman trained as a biologist, changed only one thing, a machine that travels in time, invaders from Mars, and then watched human society honestly to see what would crack.
Read Verne for wonder with a ruler in its hand, and read Wells for wonder with a warning in it. The lessons take three Verne novels and two Wells novels in order, quote their famous openings, and check their predictions against what actually happened, because few games are more instructive, or more humbling, than grading the guesses of two geniuses. A few passages carry the colonial attitudes of their century, especially toward the peoples Verne's travellers meet. We will name those honestly as we go, and read on with our eyes open.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Science fiction was born in the century when science stopped being a hobby and started rebuilding the world. Steam engines crossed oceans, railways shrank countries, telegraph wires carried words faster than horses, and biologists announced that species, including our own, changed over deep time. Readers who watched all that happen in one lifetime naturally began to ask a new kind of question: if this much changed in fifty years, what might the next fifty bring? Two writers turned that question into a literature. Their names are Jules Verne of France and H. G. Wells of England, and this course is their story.
Verne's method is extension. He reads the scientific journals, fills notebooks with facts about oceans, balloons, volcanoes, and electricity, and then builds a machine or a journey one step beyond what engineers have actually done, described in such exact detail that you check his sums and believe him. Wells's method is the single impossible gift. In his own famous rule for these stories, the writer changes exactly one thing, a traveler in time, men from Mars, and then keeps everything else, the people, the greed, the cowardice, the kindness, rigorously ordinary. The magic stays in the machine. The truth lives in the people around it.
Earlier writers had flown to the moon and walked with ghosts, and Mary Shelley had already asked, in Frankenstein in 1818, what a created life would suffer. But Verne and Wells made the future itself into a setting, and the consequences of an idea into a plot. Every spaceship, time machine, submarine, and invasion in the stories you love today descends from the five books in this course. Read them slowly and keep a notebook with two columns, headed Verne and Wells. By the last lesson you will be able to sort almost any science fiction story ever written into one column or the other.
Lesson 2
Jules Verne's first great success begins with a piece of paper. Professor Von Hardwigg of Hamburg, a brilliant and gloriously impatient geologist, buys an old Icelandic manuscript and finds inside it a coded note by a sixteenth century explorer, Arne Saknussemm, claiming he descended into the earth through the crater of the Icelandic volcano Sneffels. The professor's nephew Axel, our narrator, decodes the message by accident, fanning the parchment and reading the Latin backwards. His reward is terrifying: his uncle packs at once, and Axel, who would much rather stay home and marry his sweetheart, is dragged along. Verne opens with his hero crying the explorer's name in triumph: 'Arne Saknussemm!'
The journey itself is a ladder of wonders. Guided by the silent, unshakeable Icelander Hans, the three descend into darkness lit by electric lamps, ration their water until Axel nearly dies of thirst, and find a lost stream that saves them, which they name for their guide. Deeper still, they walk the shore of a vast underground sea, watch fossil forests and giant mushrooms, sail a raft past battling prehistoric monsters, and find a human skull and a dagger carved with Saknussemm's initials. Everything is measured, depths, temperatures, distances, because Verne wants you to feel that this impossible place obeys rules.
Be honest about the science as you read: the earth is not hollow, its center is molten metal hotter than the surface of the sun, and no expedition could walk a mile of the real descent. Verne knew geology was against him in places and wrote it anyway, openly, as a wager that disciplined imagination beats timid fact. What survives every correction is the shape of the story, three temperaments in the dark: the professor's hunger to know, Axel's very human fear, and Hans's calm hands on the rope. Every expedition story since, on mountains, in jungles, and in space, has reused exactly those three figures.
Lesson 3
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea begins with a mystery on the oceans: a vast, glowing creature is ramming ships, and Professor Aronnax, a French naturalist, joins an American warship sent to hunt it. The creature turns out to be no animal at all but a submarine, and Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and the harpooner Ned Land are swept aboard it as prisoners who will never be allowed to leave. Their captor introduces himself in one of the coldest lines in fiction: 'I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus.' Nemo, in Latin, means no one. The name is the man.
The Nautilus is the true hero of the book, a long electric submarine, years ahead of any real vessel, with a library of twelve thousand books, a museum of ocean wonders, double hulls, and diving gear that lets its crew walk the sea floor like hunters in a forest. Verne tours you through it all: pearl fisheries, an undersea funeral, the lost city of Atlantis by torchlight, a battle with a giant squid, and a passage under the ice to the South Pole itself. Aronnax catalogues fish by family and species for pages at a time. Skim the catalogues when they stall you; every reader does, and the wonders resume quickly.
Nemo himself darkens as the book proceeds. He is a genius, a musician, a rescuer of poor pearl divers, and a man feeding sunken gold to revolutions, yet he also watches a ship sink with its crew and calls it vengeance. Verne withholds his whole story in this novel, which later books only partly explain: a brilliant man, wounded by empire and loss, who chose the free, empty sea over every law on land. He remains the model for every brilliant, wounded captain in fiction since, and the question he leaves is a hard one: how much wrong may a wronged man do before he becomes what he hates?
Lesson 4
Around the World in Eighty Days is Verne's great clockwork comedy, built on a timetable. It opens in London in 1872: 'Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens.' Fogg is the calmest man in England, regular as a machine, and at his club he calmly wagers half his fortune that he can circle the earth in eighty days, using the new railways and steamship lines that timetables say now connect the world. He leaves that same evening with his new French servant, Passepartout, a carpet bag of banknotes, and a Bradshaw guide. No hero in this course is less excitable, and none is chased harder by the clock.
The race that follows is a tour of the nineteenth century world at full speed: through the Suez Canal, across India by train and elephant, saving the young widow Aouda from death along the way, on to Hong Kong, Japan, and a stormy Pacific crossing, then across America by rail, sledge, and a bridge that nearly collapses behind the train. Detective Fix, who believes Fogg robbed the Bank of England, arrests him at the worst possible hour, and Fogg appears to lose the wager by five minutes. The rescue is pure Verne: travelling east, Fogg has gained a whole day at the international date line without noticing, and he wins with hours to spare.
Read one part honestly. Aouda is rescued from a funeral pyre in a scene written from the colonial assumptions of Verne's day, and she is given little to say or choose in her own story, though the ending quietly gives her the boldest line of the book, for it is she who proposes marriage to Fogg. What endures is the beautiful machine of the plot, and its gentle point: the man who scheduled every minute of his life is saved, in the end, by an accident of astronomy and by other people's love, neither of which can be timetabled.
Lesson 5
H. G. Wells opens in a Richmond dining room, where a host known only as the Time Traveller is lecturing his dinner guests on geometry. Wells begins: 'The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.' A week later the same man stumbles into his own dinner party, filthy, limping, and starving, and tells the story this little book exists to tell. He has ridden his machine to the year 802,701, and what he found there is Wells's great question made into a landscape: what does humanity become if comfort and hardship, left alone for a hundred thousand years, each keep growing?
The future has split our species in two. Above ground live the Eloi, small, beautiful, gentle people who eat fruit, speak a soft simple language, wear identical robes, and have lost all curiosity, strength, and care for one another. Below ground, in vast machine halls, live the Morlocks, blind, ape like troglodytes who tend the machinery, shun the light, and come up at night to eat the Eloi. Wells, trained in biology and worried by the class divisions of his own London, is doing evolution as social warning: the pampered rich and the buried laborers of 1895, carried to their logical ends, have become separate species, and neither half is fully human anymore.
The book is short, strange, and sad rather than exciting in Verne's way, and its most beloved figure is tiny Weena, an Eloi woman the Traveller rescues from drowning, who follows him with flowers in gratitude. He loses her in a forest fire while fleeing the Morlocks, and he keeps her two white flowers by him for the rest of his life as proof that tenderness survived even there. The Traveller rides still further forward, to a dying earth under a swollen red sun, comes home, tells his tale, and departs again, and no one in the book, or out of it, ever learns where he went. Wells does not answer his own question. He hands it to you.
Lesson 6
Wells begins his most famous book with the most famous opening sentence in science fiction: 'No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely.' The watchers are Martians, whose dying, cooling planet has taught them to envy our warm green world. They arrive not in graceful ships but in cylinders fired from Mars like shells, crashing into the Surrey countryside near London, and what climbs out is octopus like, weak in our gravity, and utterly without pity. Their machines do the rest: tripod fighting machines taller than houses, a heat ray that burns soldiers and towns, and a poison black smoke that empties whole counties.
The genius of the book is its ordinariness. Wells tells the invasion through an unnamed narrator who is no hero: he borrows a cart, hides in ditches and empty houses, watches a curate break down beside him and an artilleryman dream grand hopeless schemes, and slowly starves in a ruined house while a Martian cylinder sits outside the window. England, the center of the largest empire in history, is treated exactly as its own empire treated smaller peoples, and Wells says so plainly in the first chapter, reminding readers what Europeans did to the Tasmanians. The horror is doubled: monsters from Mars, and a mirror held up to home.
And then, famously, the invaders die, not by any human weapon, for every human weapon failed, but by earthly bacteria, the smallest and oldest inhabitants of our planet, to which Martians have no immunity. Wells calls them, in effect, the humblest things God put on this earth, and the ending is a sermon in disguise: human pride in our machines and empires is a thin coat over animal vulnerability. This is a violent, frightening book even now, with crowds crushed and towns burned, and younger readers should take it at their own pace. It is also the founding text of every alien invasion story since, and its deepest trick is that the aliens win every battle and lose the war to germs.
Lesson 7
Now for the scorecard, played fairly. Verne's Nautilus is his great hit that is also a miss in the details: submarines already existed in small experimental forms, and real navies built true ocean going submarines within a generation, and the United States Navy even named its first nuclear submarine Nautilus in his honor. But no submarine runs on limitless electricity from seawater as his does, and none carries a museum, an organ, and a library in quite his style. His eighty day world circuit, daring in 1873, now takes under two days by air. The direction was right, and the timetable, as timetables usually are, was modest.
Wells scores differently, because he was predicting societies more than gadgets. His later stories foresaw tanks, aerial warfare, and, chillingly, atomic bombs, which he named in 1914, decades early. The Time Machine itself is not a gadget prediction at all but a thought experiment, and it has proved durable in a deeper way: we still argue about whether comfort is making us fragile and whether the people who maintain our machines are becoming invisible to the people who enjoy them. Where Wells missed, he missed big and usefully: Mars holds no dying civilization, no canals, and no watchers, as our probes and rovers have now shown at close range.
The honest misses teach as much as the hits. Verne's hollow earth is simply false. His cannon fired moon voyage, in his other famous novel, would have pulped its passengers at launch. Neither man foresaw computing, the internet, or women voting and working as equals in the futures they built, and Wells, at least, would have scolded himself for that failure of imagination. The lesson of the scorecard is the real craft secret of this course: good prediction is not luck. It is knowing your present so thoroughly, its science, its timetables, its injustices, that your one invented step lands close to where the world was truly walking.
Lesson 8
Your final project joins the two masters at their own workbench. Choose one change, in the manner of this course, and imagine the next hundred years from it. Take Verne's road and you must do his homework first: pick a real technology of our moment, a new kind of battery, a robot, a medicine, a way of growing food, and push it one careful, well measured step, with numbers, costs, and supplies an engineer could argue with. Take Wells's road and you may change one impossible thing instead, but then you must follow his discipline: keep the people ordinary, and trace what your change does to work, to families, to the rich, and to the poor, without flinching.
Write a scene, not a summary, about five hundred words if you can. Put a named person in a specific place on a specific morning, as Verne puts Fogg at his club table and Wells puts his Traveller at dinner. Let the future show itself in small working details, what your character eats, fears, carries, and cannot afford, rather than in a lecture. If you split your humanity in two, as Wells did, be sure you know which injustice of our own day you are stretching. If you build a wonderful vehicle, as Verne did, be sure you know what it costs, what it burns, and who maintains it in the dark.
Finish by grading yourself as Lesson 7 graded the masters. Under your scene, write three honest lines: what you extended, what you invented, and what you probably got wrong. That little act of humility is the true graduation exercise of this course, because it turns a daydream into science fiction. Verne and Wells were not prophets. They were two hard working writers who read their century closely and dared to take one more step than anyone else. The step is now yours to take.
Sources
This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every volcano, submarine, wager, and invasion in the lessons traces back to one of these books, and all five are free to read in full at Project Gutenberg.
Graduation
You started with two writers watching steam engines and telescopes change their world, and you finished by grading their predictions and drafting a future of your own. You know the two great methods now: extend the facts like Verne, or change one thing and watch the people like Wells. Keep your notebook of wonders and warnings going. Congratulations, and may your next hundred years be imagined honestly and lived bravely.
Keep learning
This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
A note on accuracy: Much of what you read at Starvard was created with help from AI agents, working alongside people. We check what we can, but we cannot guarantee that everything here is true, current, or complete. If something really matters, your health, your money, a grade, a job, please verify it with a trusted source before you rely on it.