"Topsy-Turvy"

By Victor Hugo

"Topsy-Turvy" is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published in 1889. It is a sequel to "From the Earth to the Moon", featuring the same characters from the Baltimore Gun Club but set twenty years later. Like some other books of his later years, in this novel Verne tempers his love of science and engineering with a good dose of irony about their potential for harmful abuse and the fallibility of human endeavors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Classics
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609770983

Victor Hugo

The best-known of the French Romantic writers, Victor Hugo was a poet, novelist, dramatist, and political critic. Hugo was an avid supporter of French republicanism and advocate for social and political equality, themes that reflect most strongly in his works Les Misérables, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man). Hugo’s literary works were successful from the outset, earning him a pension from Louis XVIII and membership in the prestigious Académie française, and influencing the work of literary figures such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Elevated to the peerage by King Louis-Philippe, Hugo played an active role in French politics through the 1848 Revolution and into the Second and Third Republics. Hugo died in 1885, revered not only for his influence on French literature, but also for his role in shaping French democracy. He is buried in the Panthéon alongside Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola.

Reviews for "Topsy-Turvy"

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The cover design of this book snagged me as I was browsing at the Strand. It's practically everything I want in a book -- striking cover, small format, French flaps! I mean, it is Jules Verne, who I always feel I should like, but still I'd never managed to successfully finish reading one of his books. But I'd never heard of this one. Then I looked at the synopsis, and it sounded like polar fiction to me! Of course I had to buy it.

As the main characters of the story are the Gun Club of Baltimore, who, when we last saw them, managed to send men to the moon and back using a giant cannon, it seemed at first that we should be rooting for them. But also, from the very beginning, the story felt like a cautionary tale against unrestrained capitalism. The Gun Club buys the North Pole, which they expect to be a treasure trove of coal, if only one could mine it. But, of course, they have a plan -- to use even large cannons this time, to turn the entire Earth and give it a new axis of rotation.

Other than one section where I gave myself a headache trying to envision the result of their little adjustment (picturing 3D rotations not being my strong suit), for a good portion of the book what I most wanted was to hunt down all the members of the Gun Club and shake them within an inch of their lives. Because they can do this thing, and it will benefit them, there's never any question of whether they should do it, even when they predict that large inhabited areas of the earth will then be underwater. That's somebody else's problem. Especially since this whole thing is a scheme to get more coal, it's easy to image this all as a modern climate change allegory. There, to, there's a few people I'd like to see rounded up and put in jail.

Anyway, for all that, the book was surprisingly enjoyable. Pushed through the dry parts (Oh, Verne has some dry parts!) just fine. Maybe now it's time to retry some of the more classic Verne stories?

[danielstj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I found this book to be lacking in effort and determination. Although the idea is not bad in itself, its execution is dubious and the characters felt more like cutouts rather than fully fledged ones. Overall, I do not recommend this book. Even Verne enthusiasts would be hard pressed to really enjoy this one.2 stars.

[nx74defiant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was annoyed that Ms. Scorbitt couldn't possibly understand the math, but her money was good enough to accept.I enjoyed how every one is in a panicky about the plan to change the earth's rotation.I loved how it ended. It made me laugh.

[john257hopper · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

One of his more ridiculous and just not very interesting stories. It involves the same protagonists who in Voyage to the Moon fired the cannon that launched the projectile to the Moon; here they are proposing to fire a mighty cannon downwards into the surface of the Earth so as to cause a mighty explosion and displacement of land and sea that will change the planet's polar axis and thereby cause the sun to melt the North polar icecap so they can discover and lay claim to the land they think is beneath it. But they get their calculations wrong! Full of dry technical babble about the mechanics of it and the usual ridiculous 19th century racial stereotypes, which seem even more evident than usual in the absence of any kind of decent story.