Jules Verne

Had he lived an extraordinarily long time, yesterday would have been the 184th birthday of Jules Verne, French father of “science-fiction.” He discovered early in his adult life that people would pay for his stories, and they made him a wealthy man. Fanciful to the core, his tales also presented ideas that later became inventions, such as the submarine and the space vehicle.
I confess I enjoy science-fiction. I recognize the fact that the founder of a well-known cult was a science-fiction writer, but “guilt by association” is an unreliable concept. A bad person can have many ideas, relationships and associations that have absolutely nothing to do with his character or lack therof. Gangsters may eat breakfast every morning, but does that mean that eating breakfast shows me to be a criminal? Absolutely not.
I like, however, the brand of science-fiction that majors on the positive instead of the negative. Too many of these products glorify the dark side of human nature. I like R2-D2, the robot with the cute whistles and computer-created personality, and his pal, C-3PO, mild-mannered machine. Be that as it may, the sci-fi genre is here to stay in all its forms. We tend to forget that it was non-existent before Jules Verne’s writings in the 19th Century.
Like Charles Dickens (yesterday’s blog), his ideas brought him wealth. Others who followed took the ideas and created inventions with them. That’s not unusual because every innovation has first been just an idea. Jesus warned us all to guard our thoughts, and to love the Lord with all our minds because ideas have a way of becoming actions in real life. A wonderful Bible verse to adopt as a rule of life is, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord.” As a television personality of yesteryear used to say, “Keep thinking those good thoughts.”