Around the World in Eighty Days

In 1863, Jules Verne (1828-1905) published Five Weeks in a Balloon, and struck a new vein in fiction - stories that combined popular science and exploration. He wrote 54 novels in the Extraordinary Voyages series. Michael Glencross, the translator, has written widely on French literature and culture. Brian Aldiss is a distinguished Science Fiction writer as well as a poet, essayist, dramatist, SF historian and critic. His lastest work is Super-State: A Novel of Future Europe (2002).

Jules Verne was born in France in 1828 and died in 1905. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel was wildly successful, producing many brilliant novels in the burgeoning genre of science fiction: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days, among others. Verne is the second most translated author in the world, after Agatha Christie and before Shakespeare.