Franz Born’s brisk biography follows Jules Verne from a Nantes childhood spent reading travel accounts and haunting the docks to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires.

Verne's novels are the ones that turned the scientific knowledge of the nineteenth century into submarines, lunar expeditions, global races and journeys beneath the earth. It is especially interested in Verne’s apprenticeship as an obsessive researcher, filling notebooks with discoveries from geography, astronomy and engineering before converting them into adventure.

Published for younger readers in the 1960s, the book also preserves the period’s heroic idea of Verne as a technological prophet whose fiction somehow “predicted” the modern world. That claim is more complicated than the title admits: Verne rarely invented machines from nothing, but understood how to take emerging technologies, extend them one unnerving step, and imagine the societies they might produce. A lovely vintage introduction to both the writer and the cultural manufacture of the future.

Unusual copy, a Scholastic paperback, later printing. Originally published in English in 1963. Good vintage condition with cover wear and page tanning.