The founding texts of modern science fiction — in a landmark new English translation.
Jules Verne did not merely write adventure stories. He invented a new grammar of the imagination — one grounded in the science of his age, yet reaching toward the unknown with the precision of a cartographer mapping seas no one had sailed. Extraordinary Voyages gathers four of his greatest novels in a complete new English translation by Henry Bugalho, accompanied by critical essays that reveal the philosophical ambition concealed beneath the spectacle of his adventures.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas — The most visionary novel of the nineteenth century: a world beneath the waves, a submarine named Nautilus, and Captain Nemo — the most enigmatic figure in all of fiction, a man of absolute freedom who chose the ocean as his exile.
Around the World in Eighty Days — A wager that becomes a meditation on time, empire, and the shrinking of the world: Phileas Fogg and his unflappable Passepartout race across continents while the century accelerates around them.
Journey to the Center of the Earth — Descent as philosophy: Professor Lidenbrock leads his nephew Axel into the volcanic passages beneath Iceland and toward a primordial world where geological time dissolves the present.
The Mysterious Island — Verne’s most complete novel: five castaways, one island, the entire history of civilization rebuilt from nothing — and a secret that connects this book to all the others.
✦ All four novels complete and unabridged, in a new translation restoring the scientific precision and literary elegance of Verne’s French originals.
This edition also includes: ✦ Afterword: The Engineer and the Abyss — a critical essay on Verne’s vision of knowledge, technology, and the limits of human ambition ✦ The Age of Verne: Empire, Industry, and the Imagined Future — a historical essay placing his work at the center of the nineteenth century’s transformation of the world ✦ A Life in Full: Jules Verne (1828–1905) — a complete biographical essay by Henry Bugalho
For readers who enjoy: ✦ Classic science fiction at its most foundational ✦ Literary fiction that takes ideas as seriously as plot ✦ Victorian adventure with genuine philosophical depth ✦ The origins of speculative imagination in world literature
“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe… The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence.”
