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The North American Jules Verne Society is pleased to present its first-ever anthology of short stories, written by a select group of modern authors, inspired by classics like Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, and other novels and stories by the 19th-century master of “Extraordinary Voyages,” Jules Verne.

The Mysterious Island was published in 1874, and it is one of Verne's longest novels. The plot depicts a group of men who have become castaways stranded on an island in the Pacific during the American Civil War. The novel describes their attempts not only to survive but also, with the aid of the scientific and technological know-how, to rebuild their world from the meager resources of the island. At the end, however, it is realized that Captain Nemo, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has secretly been helping the settlers.

At the Weldon Institute in Philadelphia, a mob of zealous balloon enthusiasts plans to conquer the sky in a state-of-the-art dirigible. When a stranger, the mysterious Robur, declares that the future belongs not to balloons but to heavier-than-air flying machines, the Institute scornfully dismisses the idea. But Robur demands vengeance—and has a unique flying machine that will allow him to take it.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is one of Jules Verne's first novels and remains one of his most audacious and imaginative. This audiobook uses the translation published anonymously by Routledge in 1876, recently identified as the work of the translator Jessie Campbell.

The men who fired a projectile From the Earth to the Moon are back, this time with an even more outrageous idea. Convinced that there are massive coal deposits at the North Pole, they want to tilt the axis of the earth enough to melt the ice cap. They see fortunes to be made; the rest of the world sees devastation and destruction. It’s one of Verne’s strongest satires about corporate greed and the evils of unregulated industrialization.

From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel, Around the Moon, present Jules Vernes 19th-century vision of space travel. Because rockets at the time were seriously limited in range and payload, he launches his three travelers from a gigantic cannon instead. In a voyage with striking parallels to the Apollo space program, they leave in a conical projectile from South Florida, experience weightlessness, orbit the Moon, conduct experiments, and end up splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

The Amputee’s Guide to Jules Verne is a listener's guide to every novel Jules Verne wrote; in that respect alone, there is no other book like it on the market. But it’s more than that. Nick DiMartino has included several essays evaluating Verne’s overall approach as a writer and the values embodied in his work. He has included as well a number of deeply personal essays about his struggles with the loneliness, pain, and lack of mobility that came with being an amputee.

Invasion of the Sea was written in 1904 when large-scale canal digging was very much a part of the political, economic, and military strategy of the world's imperial powers. Instead of linking two seas, as existing canals (the Suez and the Panama) did, Verne proposed a canal that would create a sea in the heart of the Sahara Desert. The story raises a host of concerns—environmental, cultural, and political. The proposed sea threatens the nomadic way of life of those Islamic tribes living on the site, and they declare war.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was the first author to popularize the literary genre of science fiction. Written in 1898 and part of the author's famous series Voyages Extraordinaires, The Mighty Orinoco tells the story of a young man's search for his father along the then-uncharted Orinoco River of Venezuela.