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| ONE of the fathers of science fiction, Jules Verne, was born in Nantes, France (1828). He's best known for his novels A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Growing up, he was obsessed with machines and travel. He loved to go to factories and to the shipyard, and when he was ten years old he tried to hop a boat to the West Indies, but his father caught him just before the boat set sail. He fell in love with literature as a young man, and hoped to write important novels in the style of Victor Hugo. But in order to make money he was forced to write adventure stories and scientific articles for popular periodicals. Then, one day, he got the idea of combining an adventure story with his scientific knowledge. It was the height of the industrial revolution, and technology was on everybody's mind, but most writers who had written fiction about technology had taken a pessimistic view, predicting that technology would destroy the soul of humanity. Verne was an optimist, and he began to write a series of novels about people traveling around the world in exciting new vehicles, the first of which was Five Weeks in a Balloon (1869). He anticipated many inventions in his fiction, including automobiles, airplanes, helicopters, fax machines, tanks, skyscrapers, televisions, and picture phones. His novels were hugely popular. When he wrote Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), a shipping company persuaded him to have his hero ride on one of their ships in the novel. It was one of the first examples of product placement advertising. Jules Verne said, "Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real." His imagination anticipated the submarine, the landing on the moon and air travel, as well as the exploration of space. His tales of adventrue incorporated, for his time, astoundingly prophetic technological inventions. |
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