If you’ve ever picked up a tattered paperback of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or watched a big-budget movie about a journey to the center of the Earth, you’ve touched the edges of the Voyages Extraordinaires Jules Verne. It’s a massive collection. We’re talking 54 novels published during his lifetime, plus some posthumous ones. Most people think of Verne as a guy who just predicted the future. You know, the "father of science fiction" who dreamt up submarines and moon landings. But that’s kinda missing the point.
Verne wasn't a scientist. He was a playwright who got lucky when he met a savvy publisher named Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Together, they created a brand that basically mapped the entire world for a generation of readers who had never left their own villages. It wasn’t just about the "future." It was about the now.
What the Voyages Extraordinaires Jules Verne Actually Were
The project was ambitious. Like, "let’s write down everything we know about the world" ambitious. Hetzel’s goal for the series was to "outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science."
He wanted to educate people while scaring the pants off them with giant squids.
It started in 1863 with Five Weeks in a Balloon. It was an instant hit. Why? Because it felt real. Verne spent hours in the National Library of France, digging through journals from explorers and scientific papers. He wasn't guessing. He was extrapolating. When he wrote about Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, he was looking at the actual experimental submarines of the 1860s, like the Plongeur, and just asking, "What if this actually worked well?"
The Hetzel Connection
You can’t talk about these books without talking about the editing. Hetzel was a bit of a control freak. He toned down Verne’s darker impulses. Verne wanted Nemo to be a Polish nobleman seeking revenge against Russia. Hetzel, worried about the Russian book market, made him a more mysterious, stateless figure. This tension between Verne’s cynicism and Hetzel’s desire for "educational family fun" is what gave the series its unique flavor.
The books were sold in these beautiful, ornate "cartonnages" (red and gold bindings). They were the status symbols of the 19th-century middle class. If you had a row of Voyages Extraordinaires Jules Verne on your shelf, you were a person of the world.
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The Most Famous Trips (and the Ones You’ve Never Heard Of)
Everyone knows the "Big Four."
- Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
- From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
- Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)
But the series goes deep. Have you heard of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras? It’s a brutal, chilling story about an obsession with reaching the North Pole. It’s way darker than the stuff Disney adapted. Or The Begum's Fortune, which is basically a proto-dystopian novel about a German scientist building a city-sized weapon of mass destruction.
Verne was obsessed with limits. He wanted to see how far a human could go before they snapped. In Around the World in Eighty Days, the conflict isn't even the travel—it's the clock. Phileas Fogg is a man who treats his life like a mathematical equation. It’s hilarious and tense, and it’s arguably the most "human" book in the whole series.
The Weird Side of the Voyages
Some of the later books get strange. The Sphinx of the Ice Fields is a literal sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished novel. Verne was a huge Poe fan. He wanted to provide a "scientific" explanation for the weirdness Poe wrote about. It didn't always work, but the effort was fascinating.
Then there’s Propeller Island. It’s about a massive, floating artificial island for millionaires that eventually gets torn apart because the people on the "left side" and the "right side" can't stop arguing. Sound familiar? Verne was seeing the cracks in the Gilded Age long before they became canyons.
Why We Get Verne Wrong
The biggest misconception? That he was a "prophet."
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Verne actually hated being compared to H.G. Wells. Wells wrote about things that were impossible, like time travel or Cavorite (a gravity-defying metal). Verne stayed in the realm of the "could be." He used electricity for the Nautilus because electricity was the hot new thing in the 1860s. He launched his moon capsule from Florida because he did the math and realized you needed to be as close to the equator as possible for the best centrifugal boost.
It wasn't magic. It was research.
The "Extraordinary" Reality
The "Extraordinary" in the title didn't mean supernatural. It meant out of the ordinary experience. He was taking his readers to the deep sea, the poles, and outer space because those were the only places left that weren't on a map yet.
By the late 1800s, the "Extraordinary" started getting bleaker. Verne got older. He got shot in the leg by his nephew. His mother died. His later books in the Voyages Extraordinaires Jules Verne collection, like The Master of the World, show a man who was terrified of how technology would be used by tyrants. The optimism of the early balloon flights was gone.
Reading the Voyages Today
If you try to read them now, you'll notice some stuff that hasn't aged well. The 19th-century colonialist perspective is baked into the DNA of these books. Verne’s view of indigenous peoples is often patronizing or flat-out racist, reflecting the "civilizing mission" mindset of Victorian Europe.
However, his environmentalism was weirdly ahead of its time. Captain Nemo talks about the overfishing of whales with a genuine sense of mourning. He sees the ocean not just as a resource, but as a sanctuary from the "despots" of the land.
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A Tips for Modern Readers
Don't start with the abridged versions. They cut out the lists. Verne loved lists. He will stop the plot of Twenty Thousand Leagues for five pages just to categorize every fish he sees through the window. Honestly, it’s part of the charm. It’s like a 19th-century Wikipedia rabbit hole.
If you want the real experience, look for translations by William Butcher or Frederick Paul Walter. The old Victorian translations (like the ones by Lewis Mercier) are notoriously bad—they cut out the science, changed the measurements, and even deleted political passages that sounded too "French."
Actionable Steps for Exploring Verne’s World
If you're looking to dive into the Voyages Extraordinaires Jules Verne, don't just grab the first copy you see at a thrift store.
- Check the Translator: Look for names like William Butcher or Arthur B. Evans. If the book doesn't list a translator, it’s likely a 100-year-old public domain version that might be missing 20% of the original text.
- Start with "Eighty Days": It’s the most accessible. No heavy sci-fi, just a high-stakes heist-style race against time.
- Visit the Maison Jules Verne: If you're ever in Amiens, France, go to his house. It’s a museum now. You can see his study where he wrote most of these "Voyages." It’s a tiny room with a simple desk—crazy to think he mapped the universe from that one spot.
- Look at the Illustrations: The original engravings by artists like Édouard Riou and Léon Benett are essential. They defined how we visualize "steampunk" today. Get a "Deluxe Edition" or find the images online while you read.
- Listen to the Podcasts: There are great deep-dives on the Jules Verne Collector’s Society website. They track down the obscure facts about his life that help explain why he wrote what he wrote.
Verne didn't just write adventure stories. He created a way for us to look at the world as a giant, interconnected puzzle waiting to be solved. Whether he was talking about a giant cannon or a hollowed-out volcano, the message was always the same: go look for yourself. The world is bigger than your backyard.
To truly appreciate the Voyages Extraordinaires Jules Verne, you have to stop looking at him as a fortune teller and start seeing him as a curator of human curiosity. He took the dry facts of the 19th century and turned them into a mythos that we’re still living in. The submarines exist now. We’ve been to the moon. But the sense of wonder he injected into those things? That's the part that stays extraordinary.