“The tension between the armchair and adventure, between security and possibility, lies at the heart of Verne, as of his age—an age of scientific, technical, industrial, colonial expansion, but also of questioning and reverie . . . The template of Verne’s great novels [is] a fusing of myth and the real; a new, modern, awestruck apprehension of the man-made and the natural; a dream—yet sometimes nightmare—of the possibilities of mankind, technology and the sublime.”
—from the Introduction by Tim Farrant
