Jules Verne

Jules Verne is one of the founding voices of science fiction, the French novelist whose Voyages Extraordinaires turned the wonders of nineteenth-century science into pure adventure. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days remain in print everywhere, and his imagined submarines, rockets, and expeditions anticipated technologies that arrived decades later.

Verne's gift was marrying meticulous research to boyish wonder — he wanted the impossible to feel plausible, the machine to feel real. Expect grand journeys, ingenious hardware, and a restless curiosity about how far human ambition can reach. He is where a great deal of the genre began, and his best books still read as brisk, optimistic, endlessly inventive escapism.

• For readers who love foundational adventure SF
• Ingenious machines and grand expeditions
• Wonder grounded in nineteenth-century science