Description: Excerpted from the Introduction We all ''know'' Jules Verne - or at least, we think we do. Anyone who has ever thrilled to the exploits of a round-the-world yachtsman, or a jungle explorer, or an astronaut; anyone who has been transfixed by a mountaineer, by a deep-sea diver, by a Jacques Cousteau or a David Attenborough, in some sense''knows'' Verne, for without him it is difficult to imagine that we would be quite as alive to the excitement of exploration, adventure and discovery, that we would get quite the same fix from the new. The novels presented here, Journey to the Centre of the Earth , Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and Round the World in Eighty Days are three key texts from the pivotal phase of his career: beginning with his first major success, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864), the first of the Extraordinary Journeys , the defining series of his work; and ending with the outstanding triumph of Round the World in Eighty Days and the consecration of the Extraordinary Journeys by the French Academy in 1872. In the meantime Verne had acquired the Legion of Honour, and a fishing-boat - the first of three ever more pretentious vessels on which he would write and sail to destinations as various as Gravesend and the Mediterranean. In 1867 the first English translation of his fiction had appeared - From the Earth to the Moon , in the New York Weekly Magazine . From1873 he would go global, publishing a run of outstandingly popular novels - including The Mysterious Island, Michel Strogoff, The Steam House, Robur the Conqueror, Propellor Island, An Antarctic Mystery and Master of the World (the last before his death in 1905) - and multiple stage adaptations of his work. Verne is, according to UNESCO, still one of the world''s most translated writers (behind Walt Disney Productions and Agatha Christie, but ahead of Shakespeare and Enid Blyton). The present renderings, first published in 1876 and 1879, can give some impression of how Verne''s earliest English readers encountered him. Two things found Verne''s career: trade and travel. Born in 1828, of a lawyer father and a minor-noble mother, into a family of ship-owners and merchants in the busy maritime city of Nantes, Verne himself was sent to Paris to study law. But, like many another young man of the period, and, spurred on by another repentant lawyer, Alexandre Dumas, he turned to the theatre in his twenties, writing a number of moderately successful - if insufficiently lucrative - plays, an operetta, and several stories. In 1857 he would marry and begin a seven-year (if unsuccessful) career as a stockbroker, and, between 1859 and 1861, make his first major journeys abroad (to England and Scotland, then Norway and Denmark, followed by major trips to Liverpool and the States in 1867, to Algiers in ''78, to Scotland again in ''79, to Copenhagen in ''81, to Rome in ''84). But it was his 1862 meeting with Pierre-Jules Hetzel which really transformed his fortunes. Hetzel, the Republican publisher of some of the major writers of his age, among them Balzac, Hugo and George Sand, would follow the first success of Five Weeks in a Balloon with the myriad fictions of the Extraordinary Journeys (fifty-four novels, in eighty-two volumes, plus some twenty-five stories) over more than forty years. Of nineteenth-century literary enterprises, only Balzac''s ninety-six-work Human Comedy (another Hetzel publication) can rival it; Zola''s twenty Rougon-Macquart novels (1871-93) seem modest alongside. Hetzel was central in determining what (and how) Verne wrote; his left-leaning, improving, pedagogic influence is ubiquitous. But it would be absurd to reduce Verne to Hetzel: there are also other dialogues, of imagination and reality, mobility or displacement and stasis, which probably had their origins in Nantes. Verne, like another Breton (and relation by marriage), Chateaubriand, grew up with the sea in his blood. Aged eleven, he allegedly attempted to run away to sea to India, before being caught and promising henceforth to travel only in his dreams. The tension between the armchair and adventure, between security and possibility, lies at the heart of Verne, as of his age - an age of scientific, technical, industrial, colonial expansion, but also questioning and reverie. The two threads are evident from his first stories, written in the 1850s, A Drama in the Air, A Winter amid the Ice and Master Zacharias . They nod to earlier speculative adventure writing (such as de Bergerac''s 1657 Journey to the Moon ), but also to the contemporary vogue for Hoffmann and Germanic fantasy. They typically feature an eccentric technical genius, like previous tales of frenzied artisans and artists - Hoffmann''s Master Martin the Cooper and The Trill , Balzac''s Master Cornelius (1831) - but also like Verne''s imminent novels. France/Germany, imagination/reality: this dual inheritance is significant, revealing something fundamental both to Verne and to what would be called, somewhat inaptly, his science fiction: a whimsy appealing to something prospective, curious, enquiring, in Verne''s (and many another contemporary reader''s) mind, tempered by a supposedly Teutonic literalism, a countervailing strain of practicality, of artisan craft and technical potential, of excitement at what human ingenuity could achieve. The twin threads of fancy and practicality are embodied in the two significant works he wrote aged twenty-five, Five Weeks in a Balloon and Paris in the Twentieth Century . Five Weeks in a Balloon bears the trademarks of what Timothy Unwin has more appropriately dubbed Verne''s ''science-in-fiction''. It takes a known technical reality, balloon travel (then being demonstrated by Verne''s friend, the great photographer Nadar), and makes it extraordinary, placing it in the realm of fantasy, in a journey preternaturally impossible, because headed west against insuperable winds. Yet because we begin with the familiar, we believe. Taking the familiar and pushing it is a recurrent ploy of Verne''s - firing the gentlemen of the Gun Club from a cannon, led by Nadar anagrammatically present as Ardan in From the Earth to the Moon (1865); imagining a steam-driven elephant ( The Steam House , 1880), or an electro-mechanically powered island ( Propellor Island , 1895). Verne segues from the real to the unbelievable, to the strange but seemingly true. This is the opposite of the uncanny: the strange is made familiar, rather than the familiar, strange. Paris in the Twentieth Century, conversely, his next offering to Hetzel after Five Weeks in a Balloon, reads perhaps as the uncanny, Verne''s imagining of a world we (but in many ways also Verne''s contemporaries) would recognize, with mass-culture, long-distance communication, metros, electric lighting, fax, and cars: technologically advanced but also totalitarian, philistine, materialistic. Such candour would have sunk him; Hetzel, indeed, refused it, its vision being doubtless too dystopically off-message. Verne''s Twentieth Century would not appear until 1994, by which time it was almost historical. Five Weeks in a Balloon and Paris in the Twentieth Century thus represent two currents in Verne''s production - optimism, technology, the forward-looking on the one hand, and on the other a recurrent undertow of apprehension about mankind''s ability to handle its own inventions. But to these two currents must be added a third: a new, thing-based world of modernity and alienation, the realm, indeed, of what we now call science fiction, conceived, if not completely realized, in Paris in the Twentieth Century . Science fiction had been somewhat anticipated by the Goncourt brothers, themselves apostles of a fastidious realism, who had noted, in 1856, after reading Edgar Allan Poe, a new literary world, the signs of the literature of the twentieth century. The scientific miraculous, the fable via AB; a sickly, lucid literature. No more poetry: imagination by analysis, blow by blow [ . . . ] Something monomaniacal - Things with more role than people; love giving way to deductions and other sources of ideas, phrases, tales and interest; the basis of the novel transported from the heart to the head and from passion to the idea, from drama to its solution. But when Verne writes on Poe in 1864, he observes something the Goncourts pass over: not technology, but the human elements in Poe''s fictions. Where Ann Radcliffe uses the ''genre terrible, always explained by natural causes'', and Hoffmann a ''pure fantastic, which no physical reason can explain'', Poe''s characters are, in contrast, possible, Verne says, and eminently human, though endowedwith an overexcited, supra-nervous sensibility, exceptional individuals who are galvanized, so to speak, like people breathing air with extra oxygen, whose life were but an active combustion. Though not mad, Poe''s characters are doomed to go mad by abusing their brain as others abuse strong liquour; they push the spirit of reflection and deduction to its limit; they are themost awe-inspiring analysts I know who, beginning from an insignificant fact, reach the absolute truth. This appraisal contains the template of Verne''s great novels, and of what might be called his human science: a fusing of myth and the real; a new, modern, awestruck apprehension of the man-made and the natural; a dream - yet sometimes nightmare - of the possibilities of mankind, technology and the sublime. *** Our first such novel is Journey to the Ce

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