Robur-le-conquérant was finally serialized in the Journal des débats, June 29 to August 18, 1886—more than a year after Verne finished his first draft, and fully two years after Krebs and Renard hit the headlines.34 Early reception was lukewarm, with the first book-format edition selling a meager twelve thousand copies.35
Since then, the novel’s fortunes have improved somewhat. As airplanes developed in the first half of the twentieth century, Verne’s advocacy of heavier-than-air machines seemed more and more pre-scient—a good example of the phenomenon by which Verne became stereotyped as a Father of Science Fiction, a scientific prophet.36 In reality, the prophecy was partly self-fulfilling, as the inventors of the era had grown up reading Verne’s books; for example, the aviation pioneer Charles Richet praised Robur, saying he was “proud to be a student of Jules Verne.”37 Since then, the novel and especially its aircraft have gradually taken on legendary dimensions in Verne’s oeuvre. A 1961 film version, incorporating elements from Master of the World and named after that book, featured Vincent Price, Charles Bronson, a Richard Matheson screenplay, and a delightful model Albatross.38
Best of all, it was Robur that inspired Igor Sikorsky to fulfill Nadar’s original dream and design the first practical helicopter in 1939.39 Thanks to the novel, the whole modern history of helicopters can be traced in an unbroken line from the present, through Sikorsky and Verne, back to Nadar and his propeller-devoted colleagues at the Heavier-Than-Air Society.40
Even as it has become iconic and quasi-prophetic, the novel has also garnered criticism. Readers of the book have repeatedly echoed many of Hetzel’s first reactions to the manuscript: the characters are too boorish to sustain interest, the plot sags in the middle and is dull in general, the tone of the whole thing confuses more than it engages.41 Many of these criticisms can be parried with reasonable counterargument, as indeed Verne attempted to do in his letters to Hetzel, but the fact remains that a reader can expect an uneven experience from a first encounter with the text. Rarely has Robur been counted among Verne’s best books.42
Most distressing of all is the novel’s racism, which plunges the novel into depths of low comedy rarely present in the Extraordinary Voyages. The character of Frycollin demonstrates that Verne, despite his strong antislavery stance, could not escape his era’s assumptions about racial superiority, in which pseudoscientific classifications and popular prejudices worked hand-in-hand to depict nonwhites as inherently inferior.43 Hardly ever in Verne’s oeuvre does he so freely draw on these cultural biases to play, as one critic put it, “to the seamier side of his implied reader’s tastes in comedy.”44
The racism continues when the Albatross reaches Dahomey. Though it begins well-meaningly, with the intention of saving hundreds of lives, Robur’s violent intervention in local affairs quickly takes on overtones of imperialistic supremacism. For a modern reader, Robur’s ideology is chillingly reminiscent of the attitudes that have driven, and still drive, so many real-life aerial bombings.45
Other overarching imperialist themes may also give a modern reader pause. On the one hand, the aloof Robur seems to act contrary to existing political systems; he appears to threaten the colonial status quo by his private possession of game-changing technology.46 On the other, as the book’s very title underscores, Robur is above all else a conqueror who views the sky as a realm to be ruled, a new empire to be dominated. In that sense, his “conquest of the air,” complete with flag planting, is nineteenth-century positivist politics as usual.47
For all those problems, though, there are multiple reasons why Robur remains worth reading. Verne himself sums up three of those reasons remarkably well in a single word, when, in chapter 6, he has Robur give the sky a name: Icaria.
First and foremost, Icaria suggests Icarus, the mythological icon for the dream of flight. It could hardly be clearer that the novel’s main impetus is to explore that dream. Like his colleagues at the Heavier-Than-Air Society, Verne sings the praises of propeller-based aircraft because they allow him to embrace the joys of ballooning (the sightseeing, the travel possibilities, the technological achievement, the sheer sense of wonder) while leaving the drawbacks behind in the opposing camp. The end effect, in Robur as in all the Society’s propaganda, is to imply the complete obsolescence of aerostats in favor of a less overrated, more hypothetically reliable alternative—or at least to encourage disdain for balloons, so as to win aircraft experimenters the time and money they needed for results.48
Indeed, on first reading, Robur’s plot makes the most sense when viewed as two opposing ideas battling it out in a series of circumstances, rather than as a naturalistic development of character and action. With his economically drawn characters and shamelessly theoretical arguments, Verne calls to mind Chesterton’s characteristically fanciful idea of a novel with “ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women.”49 As Volker Dehs has noted, Robur in fact represents Verne’s final public discarding of balloons.50 Just as Nadar’s Géant, as Verne had said back in 1863, was to be “the last balloon,”51 so the aerostat Go Ahead in the present novel is Verne’s last balloon.
Second, Icaria suggests jeux icariens—literally “Icarian games,” but more accurately translated “carnival acrobatics.” The novel is full of literary versions of such acrobatics: word games, thematic games, and even references to actual games.52 Better still is the novel’s acrobatically playful style, in which dramatic incidents are surrounded or even undercut by a self-deflating, almost Monty Python–like silliness. Hetzel complained about this tone, which he felt robbed the book of its conviction, but Verne was adamant: “It wasn’t without reason that I gave the novel that feeling, as much by the chapter headings as by the way I wrote. You see the thing from a heroic and lyrical side; I see it from a whimsical, joking, not very serious one. Without it, I wouldn’t have written the book.”53 The tone is even more jocular and self-reflexive in the manuscript, in which the narrator often addresses the reader directly with phrases such as “I believe ‥,” “We ought to add ‥,” and “our readers.” The manuscript also features additional touches of humor, such as the elegant and punning neologism “circumnaviation” (circumnavigation + aviation).54 On Hetzel’s entreaty, Verne modified this tone to something a shade more poker-faced and tongue-in-cheek, rather reminiscent of the narration in Le Tour du monde en quatrevingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873). But the bigger-picture sense that the novel is a series of jeux icariens, acrobatic games played for the enjoyment of the writer and the reader, happily remains.
Third and finally, Icaria recalls the imaginary utopia of that name, conceived by the French philosopher Étienne Cabet in the bestselling tract Voyage en Icarie (Travels in Icaria, 1840). In 1848, Cabet attempted to launch a real-life Icaria in Texas, but the project slowly fizzled out, drifting around the country and folding for good in Iowa in 1894.55 Befitting the utopian name, the novel undoubtedly exudes hope and excitement about the sublimity of the sky and the possibilities inherent in a practical flying machine. More than a century later, and despite everything that has occurred in the meantime, the theme still has the power to inspire wonder and delight.
However, Robur’s treatment of utopia is far from clear-cut. Robur himself is not an idealized utopian figure out to save society, but rather a brusque exhibitionist whose heroic dimensions, like those of Captain Nemo and several other Verne characters, come largely from his societal revolt.56 For that matter, the overarching ideal behind most utopian schemes—that of a perfectly regulated, ideologically homogenous society—could hardly be expected to sit well in a series so teeming with rebels, eccentrics, free spirits, and individualists as the Extraordinary Voyages. Small wonder that Robur’s only direct references to utopia, in chapters 2 and