Skulls in the Stars

My book on the history and physics of invisibility is off to the publisher for final approval, though there’s still some little stuff I want to add, including a comprehensive bibliography of stories about invisibility. Along the way, I’ve read a lot of stories about invisibility in science fiction, and I thought I’d share some thoughts about some of those books, since there wasn’t enough space — or excuse — to go into detail on all of them in my own text.

With my cat physics book, I was surprised at how many little things I learned even up to the final weeks before sending it to the publisher, and with my invisibility book, it has been no different. I did a last-minute literature search to see if there were any interesting stories about invisibility I had missed, and came across a novel written by none other than the famed Jules Verne (1828-1905), author of Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).

The novel is The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, written in 1897 but not released until after Verne’s death. It was first published in 1910 after heavy editing by Verne’s son Michel. Remarkably, an English version of Verne’s original manuscript was not published until 2011, by The University of Nebraska Press.

I snapped up a copy as soon as I learned of its existence, and read it in a few days. What did I think of Verne’s last manuscript?