A Western by Jules Verne?

 

The tar on the roof of the railway station at Sierra Blanca was molten in a July sun at noonday. It had been a mistake to swab the surface with stuff that would melt at a temperature of 100 unshaded. Alternation of liquefaction and congealment had let the layers of pebbles ultimately slip and stop, slip and stop until half of them had slid off the steep eaves into the tin gutter, which had also caught the drippings of tar until it was full of the mixture. Not much is done in this lazy town on the Mexican border of the United States, and what is done once is hardly ever done over again, even by the railroad people, who are all activity as contrast with the local stagnation.

This story, titled Two Alike and a Lady, is attributed to Jules Verne, the Father Hard Science Fiction.

A quick check shows that Verne wrote 36 short stories along with his sundry novels and plays. This story is not listed among that tally.

His son, Michel, picked up his father’s pen upon his death and contributed more under his father’s name, at least three of the Michel penned stories under the name of Jules have been discovered.

Whether this is an actual Jules Verne tale or one of his son’s continuations we don’t know for certain.

It originally appeared in serial form in The Delphos Daily Herald newspaper of Delphos, Ohio. The story began on July 30, 1895.

The author is most definitely listed as Jules Verne.

We must note that Mr. Verne was still alive and producing at the time but…

As far as I can tell and as far as anthologist John Richard Stephens can tell the story appeared nowhere else.

It would seem odd that at this esteemed point in his career that Mr. Verne could only get a story published in a newspaper in Ohio as opposed to his native France.

We must keep in mind this was also a time of newspaper hoaxing and exceptionally loose copyright laws.

The odds are stacked in the favor of a local writer assuming the nom de plume and picking up the check.

Provenance aside, how is this Western tale?

In a word, slight.

It starts promisingly enough with good character and local flavor, then heads into an odd bit of identical twin flummery and an escape from “Wild Indians” using a meteor-magneto hand railway car—which one would assume was the purported Verne-element.

As a fan of Mr. Verne, this story proves doubtful. Where Verne, like his modern correlate Michael Crichton, always took pains to explain how his “future tech” would operate in a way that led to believability, I never quite got a handle on the meteor-dynamo mechanism despite long passages explaining its operation.

The story is a curiosity, I’m not sorry I read it, but I wouldn’t necessarily direct others to seek it out.