The Eternal Adam
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Verne-Adam.jpg/220px-Verne-Adam.jpg)
The Eternal Adam (French: L'Éternel Adam) is a short novelette by Jules Verne recounting the progressive fall of a group of survivors into barbarism following an apocalypse. Although the story was drafted by Verne in the last years of his life, it was greatly expanded by his son, Michel Verne.[1]
Plot summary
The story is set in a far future in which Zartog Sofr-Aï-Sran, an archaeologist, deciphers the preserved journal of a survivor to the total destruction of civilisation. The discovery comes in the midst of philosophical controversies on the origin of humans, between those that believe in the existence of a unique ancestor and those that do not.
The journal describes the struggle for survival of a small group of French men and women after a sudden and unexplained catastrophe destroys the European continent, and the futility of the accumulated knowledge in the group. After seeing that their illiterate offspring will have no immediate use for the scientific knowledge they possess, the journal's author and his friends try to write down everything they remembered and store it in time-capsules for future generations, but sadly, those capsules perished in the subsequent centuries.
The conclusion of the novel implies that the unique ancestor is the survivor whose journal was discovered, and that civilisation is doomed to eternal fall and rebirth. The "eternal Adam" is the myth of Adam and Eve, a variation of which is present in Zartog's civilization and he speculates may be the only knowledge that survived from countless previous cataclysms, and the only thing that may carry on after his civilization inevitably falls.
See also
- 1910 in science fiction
- Shaggy God story, a name for the genre in which the characters end up being Adam and Eve.
References
- ^ della Riva, Piero Gondolo. "A propos des oeuvres posthumes de Jules Verne" (595–96). Europe: 73–88.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires|journal=
(help)
External links
- The Eternal Adam title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- (in French) Full original text (with illustrations)
- v
- t
- e
extraordinaires
- Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)
- Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
- From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
- The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866)
- In Search of the Castaways (1867–68)
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869–70)
- Around the Moon (1870)
- A Floating City (1871)
- The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (1872)
- The Fur Country (1873)
- Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
- The Mysterious Island (1874–75)
- The Survivors of the Chancellor (1875)
- Michael Strogoff (1876)
- Off on a Comet (1877)
- The Child of the Cavern (1877)
- Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen (1878)
- The Begum's Fortune (1879)
- Tribulations of a Chinaman in China (1879)
- The Steam House (1880)
- Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (1881)
- Godfrey Morgan (1882)
- The Green Ray (1882)
- Kéraban the Inflexible (1883)
- The Vanished Diamond (1884)
- The Archipelago on Fire (1884)
- Mathias Sandorf (1885)
- The Lottery Ticket (1886)
- Robur the Conqueror (1886)
- North Against South (1887)
- The Flight to France (1887)
- Two Years' Vacation (1888)
- Family Without a Name (1889)
- The Purchase of the North Pole (1889)
- César Cascabel (1890)
- Mistress Branican (1891)
- The Carpathian Castle (1892)
- Claudius Bombarnac (1892)
- Foundling Mick (1893)
- Captain Antifer (1894)
- Propeller Island (1895)
- Facing the Flag (1896)
- Clovis Dardentor (1896)
- An Antarctic Mystery (1897)
- The Mighty Orinoco (1898)
- The Will of an Eccentric (1899)
- The Castaways of the Flag (1900)
- The Village in the Treetops (1901)
- The Sea Serpent (1901)
- The Kip Brothers (1902)
- Travel Scholarships (1903)
- A Drama in Livonia (1904)
- Master of the World (1904)
- Invasion of the Sea (1905)
Short stories |
|
---|---|
Novels |
|
- Doctor Ox (1874, short story collection)
- Journey Through the Impossible (1882, play)
Characters |
---|
- Nautilus
- HMS Sword
Category
![]() | This article about a science fiction short story (or stories) published in the 1910s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
- v
- t
- e