Author Profile · Science Fiction
Jules Verne
1828–1905 · French
Who was Jules Verne?
The Breton lawyer's son who became the world's great evangelist for the romance of engineering. Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires — more than sixty novels published with Hetzel from 1863 onwards — sent readers under the sea, around the Moon, across Africa by balloon and down a volcano into the planet's heart, always with a manifest of equipment lovingly itemised. He was a researcher rather than a scientist, mining journals and atlases for plausible marvels, and his gift was to make the technically possible feel like high adventure. One of the most translated authors in history, he remains the patron saint of every reader who ever wanted the appendices as much as the plot.
Why they matter
With Wells, one of the twin founders of modern science fiction. Verne established the extrapolative adventure — take known science, push it one glorious step further — and proved there was a vast public appetite for it.
Essential books — and where to start
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
1864 · Science Fiction · Scientific Romance
Decoding a runic manuscript, the irascible Professor Lidenbrock drags his nephew Axel and the imperturbable guide Hans down an Icelandic volcano into a subterranean world of luminous seas, giant mushrooms and battling prehistoric monsters. Verne stacks the journey with geology, palaeontology and the thrill of scientific discovery, while Axel's terrors give the adventure a human pulse. The science was already shaky in 1864 and is fossil-grade now, but the book's sense of wonder — the planet itself as the last unexplored frontier — remains completely undiminished.
From the Earth to the Moon
1865 · Science Fiction · Scientific Romance, Hard SF
With the American Civil War over, the gun-mad members of the Baltimore Gun Club face an existential crisis: nothing left to shoot. Their solution is to cast a nine-hundred-foot cannon, the Columbiad, and fire a projectile — swiftly upgraded to a crewed capsule — at the Moon. Verne plays it as both engineering prospectus and gleeful satire of American boosterism, and his calculations were eerily prescient: a Florida launch site, a three-man crew, splashdown at sea. The story concludes in the 1870 sequel Around the Moon.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
1870 · Science Fiction · Scientific Romance
Hunting a supposed sea monster, Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil and the harpooner Ned Land are taken aboard the Nautilus, the miraculous submarine of the brooding Captain Nemo — scientist, exile and avenger waging private war on imperial navies. What follows is a global submarine odyssey through coral graveyards, Antarctic ice and the ruins of Atlantis, with Nemo himself as Verne's most haunting creation: technology's promise and its capacity for vengeance in one man. The novel is part travelogue, part character study, wholly definitive.
1797–1851 · British
Frankenstein is, by most serious accounts (Brian Aldiss's included), the first true science fiction novel: the fantastic event generated by science rather than the supernatural, with the moral bill presented in full.
1886–1950 · British
The genre's great cosmological visionary.
1866–1946 · British
The single most influential science fiction writer who ever lived.
