Other editions of book The Secret of the Island

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828 –1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. Verne was born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. The pioneering submarine designer Simon Lake credited his inspiration to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and his autobiography begins ”Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life.” William Beebe, Sir Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Ballard found similar early inspiration in the novel, and Jacques Cousteau called it his ”shipboard bible”. The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont named Verne as his favorite author and the inspiration for his own elaborate flying machines. Igor Sikorsky often quoted Verne and cited his Robur the Conqueror as the inspiration for his invention of the first successful helicopter. The rocketry innovators Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth are all known to have taken their inspiration from Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission, were similarly inspired, with Borman commenting ”In a very real sense, Jules Verne is one of the pioneers of the space age”. When cosmonaut Georgi Grechko was orbiting Earth with Yuri Romanenko on the Salyut 6 in 1978, he broadcast back a message to celebrate Verne’s 150th birthday, saying: ”There’s hardly a person who hasn’t read his books, at any rate not among the cosmonauts, because Jules Verne was a dreamer, a visionary who saw flights in space. I’d say this flight too was predicted by Jules Verne.”