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Five Weeks in a Balloon (Cinq Semaines en Ballon, 1863)
Jules Verne was a struggling author in his mid-30s, working as a stockbroker and supporting a wife and child, when he met Pierre-Jules Hetzel, the publisher of such French literary luminaries as Balzac and Victor Hugo (and later Émile Zola and Charles Baudelaire). Hetzel took an interest in Verne, and the two revised his manuscript into Five Weeks in a Balloon, his first novel in the “scientific fantasy” vein. The plot is simple—scientist-explorer Dr. Samuel Ferguson sets out to travel across Africa with the help of his manservant Joe, his friend “Dick” Kennedy, and a hydrogen-powered hot-air balloon. Based partially on the real-life adventures of celebrated explorers Sir Richard Burton and Heinrich Barth, the book fed into a popular craze for stories of Africa, the unexplored Dark Continent. Its success ensured Verne his first degree of financial independence and a publishing relationship with Hetzel that would last for decades. Talking to an English reporter in the 1890s, Verne describes his use of the now-iconic balloon with an air that is almost casual:
“I wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon, not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa. I always was greatly interested in geography and travel, and I wanted to give a romantic description of Africa. Now, there was no means of taking my travelers through Africa otherwise than in a balloon, and that is why a balloon is introduced.”
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Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre, 1864)
German professor Otto Lidenbrock sets off with his nephew Axel and their guide Hans to find the source of volcanic energy in the center of the earth. After studying the Icelandic sagas, the threesome descends down the volcano Snaefellsjökull, where they see strange sights and prehistoric creatures. They watch an Ichthyosaur and a Plesiosaur do battle as they cross a subterranean sea, and they glimpse a giant caveman and a herd of mastodon within a petrified forest before they are launched back to the earth’s surface by a volcanic explosion—landing on the southern tip of Italy. Though many accounts of Verne’s work appear ridiculous to today’s reader, he was closely following theories found in the scientific journals of the day (specifically Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, 1863) which argued for a subterranean location of the fossil record.
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From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune, 1865)
Impey Barbicane, the president of The Baltimore Gun-Club, concludes that a cannon of sufficient size could shoot a bullet-shaped vessel to the surface of the moon, and enlists Michel Ardan, a French adventurer, to board his makeshift projectile. At the end of the book, Ardan, Barbicane, and the villainous Captain Nicholl are launched into space, but their fates are left unanswered until Verne’s sequel, Around the Moon (1870). Though scientists of the day rejected Verne’s hypothesis, the book was the inspiration for Georges Méliès’ early silent film, A Trip to the Moon (1902). Also of note: Verne set the launching area for his projectile (which he named the Columbiad after Columbus) in “Tampa Town” Florida, mere miles from where NASA’s Kennedy Space Center sits today on Cape Canaveral.
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869)
The United States assembles a group of scientists and adventurers—French marine biologist Pierre Aronnax, his assistant Conseil, and Canadian harpoonist Ned Land—to track down a reported sea monster, perhaps a giant narwhal, that has been sighted by several ships in international waters. After they set sail on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, they are quickly captured by the beast, which they discover to their great surprise is a massive electrically powered submarine, the Nautilus, captained by a mysterious man known only as Nemo. The egomaniacal and vengeful Captain plans to keep the three adventurers under the sea forever, since he wants his existence to remain unknown. In the sequel, The Mysterious Island (1874), Verne reveals Nemo’s shadowy origins: he is a descendant of Tipu Sultan and a member of the Indian royal family, who took to the waves after his family was massacred by the British in 1857. (Verne originally intended to make Nemo a Polish nobleman, avenging the massacre of his family by the Russian Tsar, but Hetzel persuaded Verne to change the story for political reasons.)