Rockets zooming faster than sound from Florida toward the moon, submarines slithering under the North Pole, skyscrapers looming over moving sidewalks—all these things are part of our lives today, or will be in the near future. Yet, in the nineteenth century, they were the fantasies of Jules Verne's fertile imagination.

Verne is called the father of science fiction, and his ideas are so plausible others tried to make his fiction real. Simon Lake built his first submarine after the Nautilus from TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. CAPTAIN HATTERAS led Amundsen and Byrd to explore the poles. Phileas Fogg's journey in AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS prompted others to beat his record.

Jules Verne's life story is wrapped up in the ninety novels he wrote for an applauding public. To tell it in any other way than Franz Born has told it in this literary biography would be as impossible as it would be to imagine our world today without Verne's incredible creations. For, through his books, Verne was not just a man who predicted the future. He invented it!

From the dust jacket