Jules Verne

Jules Verne

Jules Verne
Born Jules Gabriel Verne
8 February 1828(1828-02-08)
Nantes, France
Died 24 March 1905(1905-03-24) (age 77)
Amiens, France
Occupation Novelist
Nationality French
Genres Science fiction, adventure novel
Notable work(s) A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon,The Mysterious Island
Signature

Jules Gabriel Verne (French pronunciation: [ʒyl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French author who helped pioneer the science-fiction genre. He is best known for his novels A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) and The Mysterious Island (1875).

Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before navigable aircraft and practical submarines were invented, and before any means of space travel had been devised. Consequently he is often referred to as the "Father of science fiction", along with H. G. Wells,[1] Hugo Gernsback and Edgar Allan Poe.

Verne is the second most translated author of all time, only behind Agatha Christie, with 4223 translations, according to Index Translationum.[2] Some of his works have been made into films.

Contents

Life and career

Early years

He was born in the bustling harbor city of Nantes in Western France. The oldest of five children, he spent his early years at home with his parents. The family spent summers in a country house just outside the city, on the banks of the Loire River. Verne and his brother Paul, of whom Verne was very fond, would often rent a boat for a franc a day.[3] The sight of the many ships navigating the river sparked Verne's imagination, as he describes in the autobiographical short story "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse". When Verne was nine, he and Paul were sent to boarding school at the Saint Donatien College (Petit séminaire de Saint-Donatien). As a child, he developed a great interest in travel and exploration, a passion he showed as a writer of adventure stories and science fiction. At twelve, he snuck onto a ship that was bound for India, the Coralie, only to be caught and severely whipped by his father. He famously stated, "I shall from now on only travel in my imagination."

Photo by Felix Nadar

At the boarding school, Verne studied Latin, which he used in his short story "Le Mariage de Monsieur Anselme des Tilleuls" in the mid 1850s. One of his teachers may have been the French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, professor of drawing and mathematics at Saint Donatien in 1842, and who later became famous for creating the U.S. Navy's first submarine, the Alligator. De Villeroi may have inspired Verne's conceptual design for the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, although no direct exchanges between the two men have been recorded. At Nantes in 1835, when De Villeroi and a companion submerged for two hours in a ten foot submarine, Verne was seven years old. For years afterward, De Villeroi carried on submarine experiments in Nantes.[4]

Literary debut

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After completing his studies at the lycée, Verne went to Paris to study law. About 1848, in conjunction with Michel Carré, he began writing librettos for operettas (he was co-librettist of Colin-Millard, a one act opera comique by Aristide Hignard). For some years his attentions were divided between the theatre and work, but some travelers' stories which he wrote for the Musée des Familles revealed to him his talent for writing fiction.

When Verne's father discovered that his son was writing rather than studying law, he promptly withdrew his financial support. Verne was forced to support himself as a stockbroker, which he hated despite being somewhat successful at it. During this period, he met Alexandre Dumas, père and Victor Hugo, who offered him writing advice. Dumas would become a close friend of Verne.[5]

Verne also met Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow with two daughters. They were married on 10 January 1857. With her encouragement, he continued to write and actively looked for a publisher. On 3 August 1861, their son, Michel Jean Verne, was born. A classic enfant terrible, Michel was sent to Mettray Penal Colony in 1876 and later married an actress (in spite of Verne's objections), had two children by his 16-year-old mistress, and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son did improve as Michel grew older.

Verne's situation improved when he met Pierre-Jules Hetzel, one of the most important French publishers of the 19th century, who also published Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Erckmann-Chatrian, among others. They formed an excellent writer-publisher team until Hetzel's death. Hetzel helped improve Verne's writings, which until then had been repeatedly rejected by other publishers. Hetzel read a draft of Verne's story about the balloon exploration of Africa, which had been rejected by other publishers for being "too scientific". With Hetzel's help, Verne rewrote the story, which was published in 1863 in book form as Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). Acting on Hetzel's advice, Verne added comical accents to his novels, changed sad endings into happy ones, and toned down various political messages.

In 1864, Verne wrote an admiring study of the works of Edgar Allan Poe (Edgar Poe et ses oeuvres, 1864) and it is not difficult to see Poe's works, published in France as Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary Stories), as a source of inspiration for Verne.[6] In fact, Verne was so intrigued by Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" that he penned a sequel to the work entitled "An Antarctic Mystery." Verne set his story eleven years after the disappearance of Pym and recounts through the persona of Jeorling, a man of science, the adventures encountered during an expedition tracing Pym's travels.[7]

A typical Hetzel front cover for a Jules Verne book. The edition is Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras au Pôle Nord, type "Aux deux éléphants".

From that point to years after Verne's death, Hetzel published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these include: Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864); De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, 1869); and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. The series is collectively known as "Les Voyages Extraordinaires" ("extraordinary voyages"). Verne could now live on his writings. But most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), a relatively conventional adventure tale set in Tsarist Russia, which he adapted for the stage with Adolphe d'Ennery. In 1867 Verne bought a small ship, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. In 1870, he was appointed "Chevalier" (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in the form of books. Jules' brother Paul contributed to a non-fiction story "Fortieth Ascent of Mont Blanc" ("Quarantième ascension du Mont-Blanc") to the collection of short stories, Doctor Ox (1874). According to the Unesco Index Translationum, Jules Verne regularly places among the top five most translated authors in the world.

Last years

On 9 March 1886, as Verne approached his own home, his twenty-five-year-old nephew Gaston, who suffered from paranoia, shot twice at him with a gun. One bullet missed, but the second entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp. Gaston spent the rest of his life in an asylum.

After the deaths of Hetzel and his beloved mother in 1887, Verne began writing darker works. This may have been due partly to changes in his personality, but an important factor was that Hetzel's son, who took over his father's business, was not as rigorous in his edits and corrections as Hetzel Sr. had been.

Verne in 1892

In 1888, Verne entered politics and was elected town councilor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years. Though elected from the left he stood with the right on the Dreyfus Affair and was anti-Dreyfusard,[8][9] although the theme of wrongful conviction and judicial corruption found in "The Kip Brothers", one of his last novels, suggests he may have become a Dreyfusard later in life.[10] In 1905, ill with diabetes, Verne died at his home, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son Michel oversaw publication of his last novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World. The "Voyages extraordinaires" series continued for several years afterwards in the same rhythm of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were published at the end of the 20th century.

In 1863, Verne wrote Paris in the 20th Century, a novel about a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network, yet cannot find happiness and comes to a tragic end. Hetzel thought the novel's pessimism would damage Verne's then booming career, and suggested he wait 20 years to publish it. Verne put the manuscript in a safe, where it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. It was published in 1993.

Death

Jules Verne died on 24 March 1905 and was buried in the La Madeleine Cemetery in Amiens. In 2008, efforts were initiated to have him reburied in the Panthéon, alongside France's other literary giants.

Reputation in English-speaking countries

While Verne is considered in France as an author of quality books for young people, with a good command of his subjects, including technology and politics, his reputation in English-speaking countries suffered for a long time as a result of poor translation.

Some English publishers felt 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea portrayed the British Empire in a bad light, and the first English translator, Reverend Lewis Page Mercier, working under a pseudonym, removed many offending passages. Mrs. Agnes Kinloch Kingston (writing in the name of her husband, W.H.G. Kingston) deleted parts of The Mysterious Island such as those describing the political actions of Captain Nemo in his incarnation as an Indian nobleman freedom fighter. Such negative depictions were not, however, invariable in Verne's works; for example, Facing the Flag features, in the character of Lieutenant Devon, a heroic, self-sacrificing Royal Navy officer worthy of any created by British authors. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea itself, Captain Nemo, there of unidentified nationality, is balanced by Ned Land, a Canadian. Some of Verne's most famous heroes were British (e.g. Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days).

Mercier and subsequent British translators also had trouble with the metric system that Verne used, sometimes dropping significant figures, at other times changing the unit to an Imperial measure without changing the corresponding value. Thus Verne's calculations, which in general were remarkably exact, were converted into mathematical gibberish. Also, artistic passages and sometimes whole chapters were cut to fit the work into a constrained space for publication.

For these reasons, Verne's work initially acquired a reputation in English-speaking countries of not being fit for adult readers. This in turn prevented it from being taken seriously enough to merit new translations, and those of Mercier and others were reprinted decade after decade. Only from 1965 on have some of his novels received more accurate translations, but even today Verne's work has not been fully rehabilitated in the English-speaking world.

Verne's works may also reflect the bitterness France felt in the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and the consequent loss of Alsace and Lorraine. The Begum's Millions (Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum) of 1879 gives a highly stereotypical depiction of Germans as monstrously cruel militarists. By contrast, the rare portrayals of Germans are positive in pre-1871 works such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in which almost all the protagonists, including the sympathetic first-person narrator, are German.

Hetzel's influence

Hetzel substantially influenced the writings of Verne, who was so happy to finally find a willing publisher that he agreed to almost all changes that Hetzel suggested. Hetzel rejected at least one novel (Paris in the 20th Century), and asked Verne to make significant changes in his other drafts. One of the most important changes Hetzel imposed on Verne was the adoption of a more optimistic tone. Verne was in fact not an enthusiast of technological and human progress, as can be seen in the works he created both before he met Hetzel and after the publisher's death. For example, The Mysterious Island originally ended with the survivors returning to mainland forever nostalgic about the island. Hetzel decided that the heroes should live happily, so in the revised draft, they use their fortunes to build a replica of the island. Many translations are like this. Also, in order not to offend France's then-ally, Russia, the famous Captain Nemo was changed from a Polish refugee avenging the partitions of Poland and the death of his family, killed in the reprisals following the January Uprising, to an Indian prince fighting the British Empire after the Sikh War.

Predictions

A mural in Tampa, Florida commemorating Verne's From the Earth to the Moon.

Jules Verne's novels have been noted for being startlingly accurate anticipations of modern times. Paris in the 20th Century is an often cited example of this as it arguably describes air conditioning, automobiles, electricity, television, even the Internet, and other modern conveniences very similar to their real world counterparts.

Another example is From the Earth to the Moon, which, apart from using a space gun instead of a rocket, is uncannily similar to the real Apollo Program, as three astronauts are launched from the Florida peninsula and recovered through a splash landing. In the book, the spacecraft is launched from "Tampa Town"; Tampa, Florida is approximately 130 miles from NASA's actual launching site at Cape Canaveral.[11]

In other works, Verne predicted the inventions of helicopters, jukeboxes, and other later devices.

He also predicted the existence of underwater hydrothermal vents that were not discovered until years after he wrote about them.

Scholars' jokes

Verne, who had a large archive and always kept up with scientific and technological progress, sometimes seemed to joke with the readers, using so-called "scholars' jokes" (that is, a joke that only a scientist may recognise). For instance, in Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen, a Manticora beetle helps Cousin Bénédict to escape from imprisonment when Bénédict, unguarded, follows the beetle out of the garden. Since the beetle escapes from Cousin Bénédict by flying away, when in fact the genus is flightless, it is possible that this is one such joke. Another example appears in Mysterious Island, where the main character's dog is attacked by a wild dugong, even though the dugong, like its North American cousin, the manatee, is a herbivorous mammal. Also in Mysterious Island, because of its fauna and flora, the sailor Bonadventure Pencroff asks Cyrus Harding whether the latter believes that islands (like the one they are on) are made especially to be ideal ones for castaways. In From the Earth to the Moon, it was the material used in the creation of the cannon, although in this case it was probably poetic license in order to make the description of the making of the gun far more dramatic, or The Begum's Millions, where the methods used for making steel in "Steel City", described as the most modern steel factory in the world, were rather dated, but, again, much more spectacular to describe. (See Neff, 1978)

Bibliography

Jules Verne in front of creatures from his novels and stories.

Verne wrote numerous works, most famous of which are the 54 novels part of the Voyages Extraordinaires. He also wrote short stories, essays, plays, and poems.

Note: only the dates of the first English translation and the most common translation title are given.

Novels

# French publication English translation
Title Year Title Year
1. Cinq Semaines en ballon 1863 Five Weeks in a Balloon 1869
3. Voyage au centre de la Terre 1864 A Journey to the Center of the Earth 1871
4. De la terre à la lune 1865 From the Earth to the Moon 1865
2. Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras 1866 The Adventures of Captain Hatteras 1874–75
5. Les Enfants du capitaine Grant 1867–68 In Search of the Castaways 1873
6. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers 1869–70 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 1872
7. Autour de la lune 1870 Around the Moon 1873
8. Une ville flottante 1871 A Floating City 1874
9. Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais 1872 The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa 1872
10. Le Pays des fourrures 1873 The Fur Country 1873
11. Le Tour du Monde en quatre-vingts jours 1873 Around the World in Eighty Days 1875
12. L'Île mysterieuse 1874–75 The Mysterious Island 1874
13. Le Chancellor 1875 The Survivors of the Chancellor 1875
14. Michel Strogoff 1876 Michael Strogoff 1876
15. Hector Servadac 1877 Off on a Comet 1877
16. Les Indes noires 1877 The Child of the Cavern 1877
17. Un capitaine de quinze ans 1878 Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen 1878
18. Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum 1879 The Begum's Millions 1879
19. Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine 1879 Tribulations of a Chinaman in China 1879
20. La Maison à vapeur 1880 The Steam House 1880
21. La Jangada 1881 Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon 1881
22. L'École des Robinsons 1882 Godfrey Morgan 1883
23. Le Rayon vert 1882 The Green Ray 1883
24. Kéraban-le-têtu 1883 Kéraban the Inflexible 1883–84
25. L'Étoile du sud 1884 The Vanished Diamond 1885
26. L'Archipel en feu 1884 The Archipelago on Fire 1885
27. Mathias Sandorf 1885 Mathias Sandorf 1885
28. Un billet de loterie 1886 The Lottery Ticket 1886
29. Robur-le-Conquérant 1886 Robur the Conqueror 1887
30. Nord contre Sud 1887 North Against South 1887
31. Le Chemin de France 1887 The Flight to France 1888
32. Deux Ans de vacances 1888 Two Years' Vacation 1889
33. Famille-sans-nom 1889 Family Without a Name 1889
34. Sans dessus dessous 1889 The Purchase of the North Pole 1890
35. César Cascabel 1890 César Cascabel 1890
36. Mistress Branican 1891 Mistress Branican 1891
37. Le Château des Carpathes 1892 Carpathian Castle 1893
38. Claudius Bombarnac 1892 Claudius Bombarnac 1894
39. P’tit-Bonhomme 1893 Foundling Mick 1895
40. Mirifiques Aventures de Maître Antifer 1894 Captain Antifer 1895
41. L'Île à hélice 1895 Propeller Island 1896
42. Face au drapeau 1896 Facing the Flag 1897
43. Clovis Dardentor 1896 Clovis Dardentor 1897
44. Le Sphinx des glaces 1897 An Antarctic Mystery 1898
45. Le Superbe Orénoque 1898 The Mighty Orinoco 2002
46. Le Testament d'un excentrique 1899 The Will of an Eccentric 1900
47. Seconde Patrie 1900 The Castaways of the Flag 1923
48. Le Village aérien 1901 The Village in the Treetops 1964
49. Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin 1901 The Sea Serpent 1967
50. Les Frères Kip 1902 The Kip Brothers 2007
51. Bourses de voyage 1903 Traveling Scholarships n/a
52. Un drame en Livonie 1904 A Drama in Livonia 1967
53. Maître du monde 1904 Master of the World 1911
54. L'Invasion de la mer 1905 Invasion of the Sea 2001

Play

Apocryphal and posthumous novels

Short story collections

Short stories

Apocryphal short stories

Non-fiction works

Imitations by other writers

The Wizard of the Sea by Roy Rockwood is a clear copy of Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, apart from the first chapter(s). One or two other of Rockwood's titles also seem to (lesser) resemble some of Verne's, e.g. compare Five Thousand Miles Underground to Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

See also

About Verne:

Museum entrance

Jules Verne Museum building

Other science-fiction pioneers:

Inspired by Verne:

Films based on works of Jules Verne

Jules Verne's works have inspired filmmakers almost from the birth of cinema. Georges Méliès, one of the earliest pioneers of French cinema, who had a taste for the fantastic, adapted some of Verne's works prior to 1910. Most of Verne's most famous novels, and some of his lesser known ones, received French, American, German, and Soviet adaptations in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, but probably the best known film adaptations of Verne's works came from American studios in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. These included Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), a production of Around the World in 80 Days that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1956, a production of From the Earth to the Moon in 1958, Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1959, Mysterious Island in 1961, and In Search of the Castaways in 1962. These were large-scale productions featuring top American, British, and international stars.

While American studios' interest in Verne waned after this period, productions in other countries and smaller scale American productions have continued pretty much without interruption since the invention of film, up to this day. A recent example is the 2008 remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth (which was in 3D, starred Brendan Fraser, and was a highly successful box office hit). Other notable twenty-first century adaptations include the 2004 remake of Around the World in 80 Days (starring Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan) and the 2005 version of Mysterious Island (starring Patrick Stewart) which was only loosely based on the novel. There were also references to many of Verne's works in the unsuccessful 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In 2008, three British film-makers announced their upcoming film adaptation of "Clovis Dardentor", one of Verne's lesser known works.

The majority of the many film and television productions of Verne's works have concentrated on his most famous novels, but there have also been film adaptations of many of his lesser known works, such as The Lighthouse at the End of the World, The Carpathian Castle, and The Vanished Diamond, filmed as The Southern Star. Michael Strogoff has been a particularly popular property for adaptation by non-Americans, having been filmed at least a dozen times for cinema and television, starting in 1910.

Many famous actors have appeared in Verne films, including James Mason, Kirk Douglas, Maurice Chevalier, Peter Lorre, David Niven, Shirley MacLaine, Joseph Cotton, Lionel Barrymore, Orson Welles, Vincent Price, Yul Brynner, Jackie Chan, Brendan Fraser, and even the Three Stooges. The 1956 American version of Around the World in 80 Days is sometimes credited with inventing the concept of cameo appearances by big stars, and had (often very brief) appearances by a dizzying array of famous performers, including Frank Sinatra, John Gielgud, Noel Coward, Charles Boyer, Fernandel, Trevor Howard, Cesar Romero, George Raft, Buster Keaton, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and many others.

Verne has also inspired Pop Culture, as evinced by the music video, Tonight, Tonight, by, Smashing Pumpkins, heavily influenced by a Georges Melies adaptation of, From the Earth to the Moon. Also, in, Back to the Future, Part III, "Doc" Brown & Clara Clayton bond over their mutual admiration of Verne's literature.

There have also been animated adaptations. The story Two Years Vacation was turned into a made-for-TV animation Japanese studio Nippon Animation under the title of The Story of Fifteen Boys (Japanese: 十五少年漂流記). An even more successful adaptation was the Spanish animated adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, Around the World with Willy Fog. There is also a very loose anime adaption of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea under the name Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, produced by Studio Gainax and written and directed by Hideaki Anno, best known for the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.

References

  1. ↑ Adam Roberts (2000), Science Fiction, London: Routledge, p. 48, ISBN 0-415-19204-8
  2. ↑ Unesco. "Most Translated Authors of All Time". Index Translationum. http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransStat.a?VL1=A&top=50&lg=0. Retrieved 2008-11-08. 
  3. ↑ Jules Verne (1995), Monna Lisa; suivi de Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, Paris: L'Herne, p. 101. ISBN 2-85197-328-2.
  4. ↑ Lincoln and the Tools of War by Robert V. Bruce — University of Illinois Press ISBN 978-0252060908 p 176
  5. ↑ Peggy Teeters (1993), Jules Verne: The Man Who Invented Tomorrow, New York: Walker, p. 24. ISBN 0802781896.
  6. ↑ "William Butcher, ''Journey to the Centre of the Earth'', Oxford U Press, 1992". Ibiblio.org. http://www.ibiblio.org/julesverne/books/journey_to_the_centre_of_the_earth.htm. Retrieved 2010-03-03. 
  7. ↑ "An Antarctic Mystery", The Gregg Press, 1975
  8. ↑ Walter A. McDougall (2001), "Journey to the Center of Jules Verne... and Us", Watch on the West 2, n. 4.
  9. ↑ William Butcher (2007), "A Chronology of Jules Verne", in Jules Verne, Lighthouse at the End of the World, Lincoln (NE): University of Nebraska Press, p. XXXVII, ISBN 0803246765.
  10. ↑ Jim Luce (2009), "[1]", "Jules Verne's Kip Brothers Translated into English after 100 Years," The Huffington Post
  11. ↑ Norman Wolcott (2005), A Jules Verne Centennial: 1905–2005, Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
  12. ↑ Volker Dehs, Jean-Michel Margot and Zvi Har’El, "The Complete Jules Verne Bibliography, X: Apocrypha". Retrieved on 2008-11-10.

Further reading

External links

Works by Jules Verne
 
Voyages Extraordinaires

Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) · The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) · A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) · From the Earth to the Moon (1865) · In Search of the Castaways (1867-68) · Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-70) · Around the Moon (1870) · A Floating City (1871) · The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (1872) · The Fur Country (1873) · Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) · The Mysterious Island (1874-75) · The Survivors of the Chancellor (1875) · Michael Strogoff (1876) · Off on a Comet (1877) · The Child of the Cavern (1877) · Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen (1878) · The Begum's Millions (1879) · Tribulations of a Chinaman in China (1879) · The Steam House (1880) · Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (1881) · Godfrey Morgan (1882) · The Green Ray (1882) · Kéraban the Inflexible (1883) · The Vanished Diamond (1884) · The Archipelago on Fire (1884) · Mathias Sandorf (1885) · The Lottery Ticket (1886) · Robur the Conqueror (1886) · North Against South (1887) · The Flight to France (1887) · Two Years' Vacation (1888) · Family Without a Name (1889) · The Purchase of the North Pole (1889) · César Cascabel (1890) · Mistress Branican (1891) · Carpathian Castle (1892) · Claudius Bombarnac (1892) · Foundling Mick (1893) · Captain Antifer (1894) · Propeller Island (1895) · Facing the Flag (1896) · Clovis Dardentor (1896) · An Antarctic Mystery (1897) · The Mighty Orinoco (1898) · The Will of an Eccentric (1899) · The Castaways of the Flag (1900) · The Village in the Treetops (1901) · The Sea Serpent (1901) · The Kip Brothers (1902) · Traveling Scholarships (1903) · A Drama in Livonia (1904) · Master of the World (1904) · Invasion of the Sea (1905)
 
Other works
Novels

The Waif of the Cynthia (1885) · The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1905) · The Golden Volcano (1906) · The Thompson Travel Agency (1907) · The Chase of the Golden Meteor (1908) · The Danube Pilot (1908) · The Survivors of the 'Jonathan' (1909) · The Secret of William Storitz (1910) · The Barsac Mission (1919) · Paris in the Twentieth Century (1994, written 1863)
Collections
Doctor Ox (1874) · Yesterday and Tomorrow (1910)
Short stories

"A Drama in Mexico" (1851) · "A Drama in the Air" (1851) · "Martin Paz" (1852) · "Master Zacharius" (1854) · "A Winter Amid the Ice" (1855) · "The Count of Chanteleine" (1864) · "The Blockade Runners" (1865) · "Dr. Ox's Experiment" (1872) · "An Ideal City" (1875) · "The Mutineers of the Bounty" (1879) · "Ten Hours Hunting" (1881) · "Frritt-Flacc" (1884) · "Gil Braltar" (1887) · "In the Year 2889" (1889) · "Adventures of the Rat Family" (1891) · "Mr. Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat" (1893) · "The Eternal Adam" (1910)
Non-fiction
Histoire des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs