Foreword

I first read Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in 1929. Between then and 1938 1 reread it perhaps four or five times. I saw Todd's movie version and enjoyed it immensely, but about thirty-three years passed before I read the book again. I found it to be even more charming than I'd remembered and was amazed at how well it stood up. It's a true classic-of its own genre-though not in a class with The Brothers Karamazov or Moby Dick, of course. But I saw certain elements in it that had escaped me in my youthful reading days.

After pondering on these elements for several months, I concluded that Around the World in Eighty Days had two stories. One was the exterior, the easily observable, reported by Verne as an interesting but unsinister adventure tale. The other was esoteric, behind-the-scenes, and full of dangerous implications for humanity. There was a science fiction story in Days which Verne, the father of science fiction, had not told. He had not done so because, one, he did not know of it, or, two, he dared not reveal it, or, three, he suspected something was amiss but could only hint at it.

Why were Fogg's origins so shrouded in mystery? Why was his life conducted as if he were a wound-up robot? Did he have clairvoyance or a brain which could compute the degrees of probability of future events and so act accordingly? Why did all the clocks of London strike at ten minutes to nine when Fogg got off the train at the end of his trip?
- Philip Jose Farmer