Jules Verne in five minutes
Jules Verne was a French writer who made science and geography the engine of adventure. Between 1863 and his death in 1905 he wrote dozens of novels about balloons, submarines, a cannon that fires men at the Moon, and races around the planet. His publisher sold them together as the Voyages extraordinaires, or Extraordinary Voyages. The best known are Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Verne is often counted among the founders of science fiction, alongside H. G. Wells. The two worked differently. Verne started from the science and technology of his own day and asked what it might do next. Wells was freer to invent machines and creatures that nobody had built. To see where Verne sits in the wider story, read our history of science fiction.
His books came in illustrated editions meant for the whole family, so many people first met him as children. That is one reason he is among the most translated authors in the world.
His life
Jules Gabriel Verne was born on 8 February 1828 in Nantes, a port city on the Loire in western France. Growing up among river ships fed his love of travel. His father was a lawyer and expected Jules to follow him, so the young man went to Paris to study law. He preferred the theatre. Through his twenties he wrote plays, opera libretti and short stories.
The turning point came in 1862, when he met the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Hetzel read a manuscript about a balloon journey across Africa and agreed to print it. Five Weeks in a Balloon appeared in 1863 and sold well. Hetzel then tied Verne to a long-term arrangement: a steady stream of novels, each of which would teach readers something about the world. That plan became the Extraordinary Voyages.
Verne kept to a regular writing routine for decades, first with Hetzel and later with Hetzel's son. He lived for years at Le Crotoy on the northern French coast, then in Amiens, and sailed on his own yachts, the best known being the Saint-Michel III. In 1867 he crossed the Atlantic to New York with his brother Paul on the giant steamship Great Eastern. That trip fed into his later novel A Floating City.
In 1886 his nephew Gaston shot him in the leg, which left him with a lasting limp. He still served on the Amiens city council from 1888 and kept writing. He died in Amiens on 24 March 1905, aged 77.
His later books are often darker than the early ones. Technology is not only admired but also misused. The Begum's Fortune (1879) contrasts a planned city built around health with an industrial city built around weapons. Robur the Conqueror (1886) follows an inventor whose airship answers to no government.
The Extraordinary Voyages: books to know
Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)
Dr Samuel Ferguson and two companions cross Africa in a hydrogen balloon. The book set the pattern: a real map, a scientific gadget, a small team, and a steady flow of facts about places few readers would ever see.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
Professor Lidenbrock decodes a note left by an Icelandic alchemist, Arne Saknussemm, which says a way down starts inside an Icelandic volcano. He, his nephew Axel and the guide Hans descend. Underground they find a sea, strange plants and animals from deep time. The book is a tour of nineteenth-century geology and fossils, wrapped in the question of how to get back up.
From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870)
After the American Civil War, the Baltimore Gun Club, a society of artillery enthusiasts, plans to fire a projectile at the Moon from a giant cannon. Its president is Impey Barbicane. The Frenchman Michel Ardan insists on riding inside. The launch site is in Florida. The sequel follows the flight around the Moon.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870)
Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil and the harpooner Ned Land are taken aboard the Nautilus, a submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo, who has cut himself off from life on land. The novel tours the ocean's wildlife and geography. It is also a quiet argument between Aronnax's curiosity and Ned Land's wish to escape. The Nautilus runs on electricity.
Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)
Phileas Fogg, a calm Londoner, bets his club that he can circle the globe in 80 days. With his servant Passepartout he races by train, steamship and even elephant, while the detective Fix trails him, convinced he is a bank robber. The story ran as a newspaper serial in Paris, so readers followed the days as they passed. It showed how railways, steamships and the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, had suddenly made the world smaller.
Two more are worth knowing. The Mysterious Island (1875) has escaped prisoners of the American Civil War rebuild a civilisation on an uncharted island, and Captain Nemo returns. Two Years' Vacation (1888) follows schoolboys stranded on an island; it is especially loved in Japan.
The real science
Verne read scientific journals and newspapers and kept notes on geography, astronomy and engineering. His books are not random fantasy, and some of his guesses landed close to later events. His Moon crew has three men and lifts off from Florida, and in the novel the capsule comes down in the Pacific. The Apollo missions also launched from Florida with three astronauts, and their capsules splashed down in the Pacific. This is a striking match, but not a prediction: Verne picked Florida because of its southern latitude, and the Apollo planners had their own reasons.
Other parts do not hold up. A cannon big enough to reach the Moon would crush its passengers with the acceleration. Earth's interior gets hotter and denser with depth, so there is no open sea under Iceland. These are fiction, not forecasts.
Verne also did not invent the submarine. Experimental boats came earlier, including Robert Fulton's Nautilus of 1800 and the French Navy's Plongeur, launched in 1863. What Verne did was give the idea a memorable ship, a memorable captain and a huge readership. In 2008 the European Space Agency named its first cargo spacecraft for the International Space Station the Jules Verne, a sign of how much his name stands for exploration.
Where Verne shows up in fiction and culture
Verne influenced adventure and science fiction writers in many countries. Steampunk, the style that imagines Victorian machines pushed to extremes, borrows his airships, submarines and brass gadgets. Georges Méliès's 1902 film A Trip to the Moon drew on Verne's Moon novels, among other sources.
One of his most surprising works came out much later than he wrote it. Paris in the Twentieth Century, which Hetzel rejected in 1863, describes a Paris of glass towers, trains and cars where art is ignored. Hetzel found it too gloomy and would not publish it. It first appeared in 1994.
Common misconceptions
- "Twenty thousand leagues" is the depth. It is the distance travelled. A league was about 4 km, so the total is around 80,000 km, roughly twice around the Earth. The deepest dive in the novel is about 16,000 metres, nowhere near that figure.
- Verne predicted the future. He extended the science of his time, and many of his ideas are wrong or only look right in hindsight.
- He wrote only for children. Early English translations were often cut and softened, which made him look like a children's author. His originals are longer and sometimes bleak.
- He visited every place he described. He travelled around Europe and made one trip to North America, but wrote most of his scenes from books, maps and journals.
Read next
- H. G. Wells: the other founder of the genre, who preferred invented machines to extended present-day ones.
- Steampunk: the style that turned Verne-like airships and brass submarines into a look of its own.
- History of science fiction: the long view, from early tales to the present.
