Jules Verne: Extraordinary Voyages
The best-known of the Voyages Extraordinaires, machines pointed in every direction including up. Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym closes it; Verne admired it enough to write a sequel.
- You’ll enjoy the wonderfully odd blend of scientific curiosity and pulpy adventure, especially Professor Lidenbrock’s impatient enthusiasm and Axel’s much more human fear as they descend through Sneffels volcano. The underground landscapes feel genuinely strange, though the old-fashioned science and brisk exposition can take some getting used to.
- Around the World in Eighty Days EnglishPhileas Fogg is so rigidly punctual he fires a servant over shaving water two degrees too cool, and watching that composure survive missed steamers, a rescue in India, and a detective tailing him is half the fun. Light, quick, good company on a trip.
- From the Earth to the Moon EnglishVerne's poking fun at Americans here, and it lands: a club of bored Civil War artillerymen decide to fire a cannon at the moon, and Michel Ardan cheerfully volunteers to ride inside. You'll skim some ballistics math, but the deadpan enthusiasm carries you right through.
- The Mysterious Island EnglishIf you like watching clever people build things from nothing, this is that pleasure stretched over an island: Cyrus Smith and his castaways make pottery, tools, even a telegraph from scratch. Verne lingers on the how of everything, so come patient, not hungry for action.
- Five Weeks in a Balloon EnglishYou’ll enjoy the jaunty mix of balloon engineering, African geography, and danger, especially with Fergusson’s cool determination balanced by Kennedy’s skepticism and Joe’s irrepressible humor. It’s episodic and very much a nineteenth-century adventure, so the old-fashioned colonial attitudes can be a rough patch, but the sense of practical wonder carries you along.
- Michael Strogoff EnglishYou get a brisk, old-fashioned adventure as Michael Strogoff crosses Siberia under an assumed identity, with Nadia Fedor and the bickering journalists Blount and Jolivet adding warmth and humor. It’s more melodramatic than Verne’s science fiction, but the journey has real momentum and nerve.
Verne admired Poe's unfinished narrative enough to finish it himself; his sequel, An Antarctic Mystery, sits in this catalogue. The polar horror here is the seed of the voyages.