As the author of Around the World in Eighty Days, French novelist Jules Verne is the inspiration for our own world tour. So here are 5 things you should know about the great man himself.
These facts will either change your life, or they won’t. That’s a promise.
- Verne was a pioneer of science-fiction. Along with H.G. Wells (author of The Time Machine and other classics) Verne has been referred to as the “father of science fiction”. He described the weightlessness of space travel almost 100 years before Sputnik made its first orbit of the earth in 1957
- Verne was infatuated with travel and wrote about it in all its forms: sea, land, air and space
- So itchy were Verne’s feet that he boarded a ship headed for India at the tender age of 12. He was discovered by his father before the ship set sail and vowed: “I shall from now on travel only in my imagination”
- Verne started his literary career writing librettos for operetta in the mid 1840s. When he died in 1905 he’d authored novels, short stories, non-fiction and even a play, Voyage à travers l’impossible (Voyage through the Impossible)
- When he was 58 Verne’s paranoid nephew Gaston shot him in the leg with a shotgun, leaving him with a limp.
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