Jules Verne’s tales of adven­ture take his char­ac­ters around the world, through the deep­est seas, even into the cen­ter of the Earth—on jo

Behold All 42 Maps from Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages, the Author’s 54-Volume Collection of “Geographical Fictions”

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2024-11-26 13:00:01

Jules Verne’s tales of adven­ture take his char­ac­ters around the world, through the deep­est seas, even into the cen­ter of the Earth—on jour­neys, that is, dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Verne him­self, how­ev­er, spent most his life in France, writ­ing of places he had not seen. In one apoc­ryphal sto­ry, the young Jules Verne is caught try­ing to sneak aboard a ship bound for the Indies and promis­es his father he will hence­forth trav­el “only in his imag­i­na­tion.” Whether or not he made such a vow, he seemed to keep it, though the idea that he nev­er trav­eled at all is a “tire­some canard,” writes Ter­ry Har­pold in an essay titled “Verne’s Car­togra­phies.”

Verne’s famed nov­els Twen­ty Leagues Under the Sea, Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days con­sti­tute only a frac­tion of the 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires, a col­lec­tion of fic­tion con­ceived on the basis of a sci­ence we might not think of as a rich field for mate­r­i­al.

“Of the 80 nov­els and oth­er short sto­ries he pub­lished,” geo­g­ra­ph­er Lionel Dupuy writes, “62 make up the cor­pus of Extra­or­di­nary Voy­ages (Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires). These books, in which imag­i­na­tion played a vital role, were termed ‘geo­graph­i­cal nov­els,’ a cat­e­go­ry the author him­self used for them.”

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