Balloons, Submarines and Eighty Days: How Jules Verne Turned Science Into Adventure

Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, poet and playwright best known for the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels that includes Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days. He is sometimes called "the father of science fiction" – a title also given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback – because his stories took the science and technology of his own time and pushed them into thrilling journeys. He is also one of the most translated authors on Earth: since 1979 he has ranked second in the world, behind Agatha Christie and ahead of William Shakespeare.

A boy by the river Loire

Verne was born on 8 February 1828 on Île Feydeau, then a small island in the river Loire in the port city of Nantes. His father, Pierre, was a lawyer, and his mother came from a local family of navigators and shipowners. Ships and water surrounded his childhood. In a short memoir written late in life, he recalled his deep fascination with the river and the many merchant vessels sailing on it.

His first teacher, the widow of a sea captain who had disappeared, liked to tell her pupils that her husband was a castaway who would one day return like Robinson Crusoe. The idea of the castaway – the "Robinsonade" – stayed with Verne and reappears in novels such as The Mysterious Island (1874).

There is a famous story that at eleven he ran away to become a cabin boy on a ship bound for the Indies, and that his father caught him and made him promise to travel "only in his imagination". Today it is known that this legend was exaggerated, or invented, by his first biographer, his niece, although it may have been inspired by a real incident. It is a good example of how myths grew around Verne – and a good reason to read about him with some care.

Law student, theatre lover

His father expected Jules, the eldest son, to take over the family law practice, and in 1848 sent him to Paris to study law. Verne did finish his degree, but his heart was in literature. He was deeply influenced by Victor Hugo and later said that he could once recite whole pages of Notre-Dame de Paris by heart. Through literary salons he met Alexandre Dumas and became close friends with Dumas's son, who helped get Verne's first comedy staged in 1850.

When his father offered him the family law office in 1852, Verne refused, writing that he knew who he was and what he could become one day. He worked as secretary of a Paris theatre, wrote comic operas and plays, and spent long hours in the library researching science and, above all, geography.

The "novel of science"

Verne's first published stories appeared in a family magazine whose editor wanted geography, history and science explained to a wide audience in an entertaining way. One of them, "A Voyage in a Balloon" (1851), combined adventure, travel and careful research; Verne later called it "the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow". Slowly he formed the idea of a new kind of book, a roman de la science – a "novel of science" – that would let him pour in the facts he loved to collect.

Meanwhile he needed money. After marrying Honorine Morel, a young widow, in 1857, he worked as a stockbroker at the Paris Bourse. He woke early every morning to write before work and copied his research onto note cards, a system he kept for the rest of his life. A colleague later remarked that Verne "did better in repartee than in business".

Hetzel and the Extraordinary Voyages

The turning point came in 1862, when Verne showed the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel the manuscript of a story about crossing Africa by balloon. Hetzel, who already published Balzac, George Sand and Victor Hugo, was planning a family magazine that would combine entertaining fiction with scientific education, and he saw Verne as the perfect contributor. Verne revised the manuscript in two weeks, and Five Weeks in a Balloon was published on 31 January 1863.

Hetzel then signed him to a long-term contract: three volumes a year for a fixed fee. For the rest of his life most of Verne's novels were first serialised in Hetzel's Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation before appearing as books. Hetzel announced that these novels would form a series called the Voyages extraordinaires, whose aim was to outline all the geographical, geological, physical and astronomical knowledge of modern science in an entertaining form. Verne himself put it more simply: "My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe."

The partnership was not always smooth. Hetzel made Verne rewrite the ending of Captain Hatteras so the hero survived, and he rejected Paris in the Twentieth Century as too gloomy about technology; that book was only published in 1994. For Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Verne first imagined Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist taking revenge on the Russians. Hetzel, worried about the Russian market, objected, and the compromise was to leave Nemo's past a mystery.

The great novels

• Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) – one of his most successful novels; in 1978 it was accepted onto the reading list of France's agrégation exam.
• From the Earth to the Moon (1865) – the Moon-voyage story whose spaceship, as astronauts later noted, took off from Florida and came down in the Pacific.
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869–70) – the voyages of the mysterious submariner Captain Nemo.
• Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) – the precise English gentleman Phileas Fogg bets £20,000, half his fortune, that he can circle the globe in 80 days, travelling with his new French valet Passepartout.

The last of these first appeared in the newspaper Le Temps in 1872, and much of Verne's wealth came from its hugely successful stage adaptation, as well as from the stage version of Michel Strogoff.

Was he really a prophet?

People often say Verne "predicted" submarines, moon flights and more. Modern scholars think such claims are heavily exaggerated, and Verne himself denied being a prophet. He said any link between his books and later inventions was "mere coincidence" and explained that his accuracy came from research: he took notes from every book, newspaper and scientific report he came across. He even insisted, "I have invented nothing," and said his true goal was a high ideal of beauty of style.

That is why the "father of science fiction" label is debated. Earlier writers such as Lucian of Samosata, Voltaire and Mary Shelley are also named as founders of the genre. But Verne's huge influence on how science fiction developed is beyond dispute.

Later years and a reputation reborn

In 1886 his nephew Gaston, who spent the rest of his life in an asylum, shot Verne in the leg and left him with a permanent limp. After the deaths of his mother and of Hetzel, who died that same year, his books grew darker. He served for fifteen years on the town council of Amiens, where he died on 24 March 1905. His son Michel later published several posthumous novels, but it was discovered that he had changed them heavily.

In his lifetime, critics often dismissed Verne as a popular entertainer, and he was never admitted to the Académie française – a snub he felt deeply. In English-speaking countries his reputation suffered further from rushed, heavily cut translations marketed to children. In the 1960s and 1970s, French scholars and writers such as Roland Barthes reassessed him as a serious literary artist, and better English translations have appeared since 1965.

Why he still matters

Scientists and explorers including Yuri Gagarin, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Wernher von Braun acknowledged Verne as an inspiration, and he is credited with helping inspire steampunk. In 1969, during the Apollo 11 crew's return from the Moon, Neil Armstrong mentioned Verne's book about a voyage to the Moon in a television broadcast. Ray Bradbury summed it up: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." For learners, his novels are a great way into French: the plots are fast, the vocabulary of travel and science is useful, and a good modern translation makes a perfect companion text.

Learn with Jules Verne: French phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
faire le tour du monde	to travel around the world	Elle rêve de faire le tour du monde. (She dreams of travelling around the world.)
un voyage extraordinaire	an extraordinary journey	Ce fut un voyage extraordinaire. (It was an extraordinary journey.)
sous les mers	under the seas	Le Nautilus voyage sous les mers. (The Nautilus travels under the seas.)
de la Terre à la Lune	from the Earth to the Moon	Un voyage de la Terre à la Lune. (A trip from the Earth to the Moon.)
en ballon	by balloon	Ils traversent l'Afrique en ballon. (They cross Africa by balloon.)

Try this: Write two French sentences about a journey you would like to take, using "faire le tour du monde" or "un voyage extraordinaire".