Jules Verne

Jules Verne was a French author whose adventure novels — Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days — created modern adventure fiction and inspired generations of scientists and explorers.

Jules Verne began publishing his Voyages Extraordinaires series in 1863 with Five Weeks in a Balloon and continued until his death in 1905, producing sixty-five novels in total. The series was explicitly educational in intent — his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel wanted to bring geographical and scientific knowledge to young readers — but Verne’s imaginative power consistently exceeded the didactic framework. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) are adventure novels that use science as backdrop but survive as pure narrative excitement.

Captain Nemo, the fugitive genius commanding the Nautilus through the underwater world, is one of nineteenth-century literature’s great creations: a man of brilliant intellect and absolute moral self-sufficiency, in permanent exile from a humanity he has chosen to leave behind. He returns in The Mysterious Island (1874), which reveals his backstory. Phileas Fogg, racing around the world in eighty days with his newly hired valet Passepartout, is a different kind of hero — all clockwork precision and hidden feeling.

Verne’s technological predictions — submarines, moon rockets, telecommunications — have generated a mythology of him as a prophet of modern science, though he was typically extrapolating from existing ideas. What he genuinely invented was an adventure template: the journey into the unknown, the small group encountering wonders, the return transformed. Translated into every major language, his books have sold an estimated eight hundred million copies, making him the second most translated author in history after Agatha Christie.