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"Fictional trips to the underground are a feature of all mythologies, but the best of the nineteenth-century tales is that of Verne."

~ Isaac Asimov, 1966.

“Go down the crater of the volcano Snaefells. Follow the shadow just before the month of July. You will find your way to the center of the Earth. I did it.” That mysterious message, found in a long-lost letter, propels a young man and his uncle on the adventure of a lifetime: to a prehistoric world below the earth where dinosaurs and other strange creatures still roam.

Jules Verne’s classic 1864 sci-fi novel tells the story of German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the centre of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snaefellsjökull, encountering many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, before eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano.

‘Journey’ has been read by millions of inquisitive minds and has influenced some of the worlds most famous explorers such as Admiral Byrd, who announced on his 1926 expedition to the North Pole that "it is Jules Verne who is bringing me."

Renowned cave explorer Norbert Casteret said in 1938 that A Journey to the Center of the Earth was a "marvelous book which impressed and fascinated me more than any other. I have re-read it many times, and I confess I sometimes re-read it still, each time finding anew the joys and enthusiasm of my childhood."

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About the Author

Jules Verne, born at Nantes, France, in 1828, of legal and seafaring stock, was the author of innumerable adventure stories that combined a vivid imagination with a gift for popularizing science. Although he studied law at Paris, he devoted his life entirely to writing. His most popular stories, besides 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), include: Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), A Trip to the Moon (1865), Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and Michael Strogoff (1876). In addition, he was the author of a number of successful plays, as well as a popular history of exploration from Phoenician times to the mid-nineteenth century, The Discovery of the Earth (1878-80). After a long and active career in literature, Jules Verne died at Amiens, France, in 1905.