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Jules Verne (1828 to 1905) was a French author from a devout Catholic family. He was intended for a law career but chose to write. At the start of his writing career, he wrote many different types of literature, with limited success, until he had the idea for a novel of science, a story based on science-based adventure. The first such was called Five Weeks in a Balloon, which finally brought him success as a full-time writer. Since his later novels of science began to incorporate science and technology that had not yet been realized, he became known as the father of science fiction. His books have been translated into many languages. His books can be enjoyed by readers in middle to high school and beyond.
If you want to know about Jules Verne’s life, beyond the above few sentences, Beril Becker has written a fine middle school to high school level biography, simply entitled Jules Verne. Becker, in a sense, was uniquely qualified to write about Jules Verne, since she also published a book about the eight-four-day circumnavigation of the world of the atomic-powered submarine U.S.S. Triton. This is almost exactly what Verne’s fictional advanced submarine, Nautilus, did in his one of his most famous books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (see my review elsewhere). Becker makes a nice story of Verne’s life, very readable and comprehensive, and makes good connections between his life and his published work.
From the Earth to the Moon is Verne’s famous story of the first expedition to the moon, launched from Florida by American businessmen and adventurers. He got many things right, giving Verne a reputation as a scientific prophet, but instead of a rocket he had a giant cannon shoot a capsule to the moon. The expedition did not land on the moon, since they had not way to lift off from it, but circled around the moon and came back to earth, something like Apollo 8 did in the 1960s. Verne has a light touch in his book, with some sly humor, along with a serious treatment of the technical aspects of the project. This is a fun book to read, which was written about 100 years before Apollo 11 took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the moon.
Jules Verne liked to set his science adventure novels in unknown places – under the earth, under the oceans, across Africa, through the Amazon and – through the 19th century Russian Empire, which was as unknown to most people outside of Russia as Verne’s other, more exotic venues. If all the readers of this review were honest, how many of them would know much about the interior or eastern end of Russia today? Not too many, I would guess. The novel Michael Strogoff was a chance for Verne to teach people about the interior of the Russian Empire, that unknown land, but first and foremost, it is a novel of adventure, a story of a courageous young courier risking his life to carry a crucial message from one end of Russia to the other. There are plenty of plot twists and enough adventures to satisfy any reader. A bonus for the reader is that this edition was illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, one of the series of classic novels illustrated by this master artist.
One time, long ago when I was a youth, I was riding with a group of teenage boys in an older teenager’s car, on the way to an event with the youth group of my church. I was struck by the music playing in the tape player. I loved the symphonic orchestra playing along with the complex synthesizer keyboards. There was narration, too, and I seemed to catch some words that reminded me of one of my favorite books, Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth. I was told that this rock album was by Rick Wakeman and it was called by the same name – A Journey to the Center of the Earth. In the album, Wakeman had lovingly told the story of the novel, with dramatic music, some vocal singing, and compelling narration. Fifty plus years later, I am still listening to this album in my car and I still very much like Verne’s great novel. A German professor, with his graduate student and a guide hired in Iceland, descend down through an extinct Icelandic volcano deep into the earth. They endure many hardships and discover great caverns, even one so large that it contains a sea and many animals in and around the sea. They end up back on the surface, expelled through an active volcano thousands of miles from their start in Iceland. This is a grand adventure indeed.