Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea

Author: Jules Verne

When Hugo Gernsback wanted to define "scientifiction" in the very first issue of Amazing, he called it the "Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells type of story". It puts Verne right at the core of science fiction, a place that he still holds.From the appearance of his very first novel right up to his death, Verne was easily one of the most popular and successful writers in Europe, acclaimed in particular for his "Voyages extraordinaire", carefully researched stories that took his adventurers into strange and dramatic places, usually pushing at the technological possibilities of the time. From outer space to the centre of the world, from extraordinary flying machines to even more extraordinary submarines, he took us to places we'd never seen before and made it all convincing and exciting. One of his greatest successes explored an underwater world that no-one had seen before.Hunting what is rumoured to be a giant sea monster, Professor Aronnax and his companions are surprised to find themselves taken aboard a submarine of incredibly advanced, not to say luxurious, design. Here they meet the enigmatic Captain Nemo, the archetypal Jules Verne figure, a great scientist who is also a bold adventurer and driven by a thirst for revenge. Aboard the Nautilus they travel right around the world, seeing everything from coral reefs to Antarctic ice shelves, from sunken vessels to the Transatlantic cable.Okay, Verne's books are more journey than plot, but the journeys are always marvellous, and, because he took such pains to get everything right according to the scientific knowledge of the day, absolutely convincing. Verne is one of a very small handful of writers about whom we can safely say that, without them there would be no science fiction. He's not always been well served by his English translators (which is one reason they have often been presented as books for children), but even so they have gripped generation after generation, and more than a few later writers owe their inspiration to Verne.

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Verne was, if anything, too prolific, and there's quite a lot of books that will really only be of interest to completists. But the ones that have survived tend to be those that are most science fictional, because great ideas always last. And any one of these would make a perfect Alternative Choice.

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A Journey to the Centre of the Earth takes his team of adventurers into the crater of a volcano in Iceland, to discover tunnels that take them ever deeper, where they encounter an underground ocean, petrified forests, giant plants, prehistoric dinosaurs, and giant prehistoric humans.

Alternative Choice
From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club who build a giant cannon in Florida (pretty close to our Cape Canaveral) from which they fire a massive projectile into space with three adventurers aboard. The second volume recounts their adventures as they go into orbit around the Moon before plummeting back to Earth.

Alternative Choice
Off on a Comet begins with a comet grazing the Earth, and carrying off a small chunk of land around Gibraltar. A group of people find themselves carried away on the comet, and in the course of the novel we see their various experiments to see how things behave differently with a lower gravity and thinner atmosphere.

Alternative Choice
Robur the Conquerer is like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but with a magnificent and luxurious flying machine. At a time when flying clubs were arguing the respective merits of heavier than air or lighter than air vehicles, mysterious, enigmatic and brilliant Robur shows up with his huge heavier than air craft that is able to circumnavigate the world in three weeks.