Julio Verne, página 23 de 93

The Lottery Ticket is not one of Mr. Vernes typical sea-air-adventure-stories, although it belongs to the authors well-known series called Voyages Extraordinaires. Ole Kamp, a fisherman, promises his wife-to-be Hulda, that he will make her rich after one more journey with a fishing-boat. But the boat never returns - instead a bottle arrives, containing a note for Hulda and the lottery ticket. News about the supposed tragedy mingle with high expectations and drawing-day is coming nearer and nearer ....

We leave it to the critics to determine the value of Jules Vernes descriptions if they were shorn of the marvellous in which he delights to clothe them. All we can say is. his grotesque images are highly amusing. Here we have the story of the Sepoy Mutiny in India, and hear a great deal about the terrible Nana who set it a-going. The Steam House is a gigantic engine of steel, fashioned like a huge elephant, impelled by steam, and dragging several vast cars as big as houses, up and down the country. We meet with this droll conception in many of the fabulous illustrations by a French artist.

This book travesties in Jules Vernes inimitable and fascinating style the numerous ponderous books of African travel and adventure. In thrilling interest it surpasses them all, while the illustrations with which the book is crowded are so graphic that the story itself may almost be read by them, and without going through the text.

In the spring of 1863 Professor Lidenbrock finds a secret, runic manuscript, that was written by an Icelandic alchemist hundreds of years before. It tells about a journey to the center of the earth which this alchemist claims to have made. Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel and their guide Hans decide to follow this route into a secret subterranean world ...An adventure classic for the past hundred and several hundred more years to come!

Publicada en 1865, "De la Tierra a la Luna" es una obra clave en la bibliografía de Julio Verne e introduce al lector en el mundo de la pasión y la admiración por al ciencia. Es una de sus novelas más conocidas y tambien es un ejemplo tipico del tejido de fantasia y conocimientos que convirtieron a Verne en el fundador de una ciencia-ficcion que la realidad se encargo de confirmar en gran parte.Tras el fin de la Guerra de Secesion, varios miembros del Gun-Club (dedicado a la confeccion de armas de guerra) se encuentran sin trabajo y se ponen manos a la obra con la construccion del mayor cañon del mundo jamas creado.Pero tambien quieren apuntar a la Luna, destruirla, por supuesto, y conseguir asi la popularidad y disfrutar de la gloria de ser los padres del ingenio.Pero un arriesgado aventurero los disuade de lo contrario: propone cambiar la bala de cañon por un proyectil cilindrico hueco donde puedan viajar algunos hombres. La idea es aceptada con gran revuelo y los hombres se preparan para el viaje.Un relato lleno de trepidantes episodios con las aventuras y desventuras de los tres protagonistas en el viaje a la Luna, la estancia y los descubrimientos que alli llevan a cabo.

Jan van Mitten, a dutch businessman, meets his tobacco dealer Keraban in Istanbul. The latter decides to take Jan and his employee Bruno to his home on the other side of the Bosporus. When Keraban learns that he should pay a tax for shipping to the other side of the strait, he is so enraged that he decides to go all around the Black Sea with this visitors ....

Jules Verne! Among boys a name to conjure with. What memories of half-forgotten books does it bring back! Journeys into the Interior of the Earth, Voyages on Comets, Journeys to the Moon, Submarine Boatsall are creations of his marvellously inventive brain. The Purchase Of the North Pole is a sequel to " From the Earth to the Moon." J. T. Maston, the secretary of the Gun Club of Baltimore, evolves the plan of changing, by the discharge and subsequent recoil of a huge cannon, the worlds axis, so as to lay bare the North Pole and the wealth of minerals which it is supposed to contain. The plan is kept secret, but alimited liability company is formed for the purchase of the Folar cap, all the shares being taken up by members of the Gun Club. When, however, the plan is made known the world becomes alarmed the surface of the earth will be changed, whole countries and peoples will be buried under some thousand feet of water, while Britain and Southern Australia will have only the most rarefied air, and measures are taken for the arrest of the directors of the scheme. They have fled, however, and when their whereabouts become known it is to late, they cannot be stopped, and the world resigns itself to its fate. Let the boys, and their elders, see the result for themselves.

Vernes story describes a trip on the "Great Eastern," from Liverpool to New York, and a journey afterwards up the Hudson and to the Falls of Niagara. The descriptive parts of the story are free from Vernes well-known peculiarities, and therefore seem tame coming from his pen ; but in making " the floating city" the scene of a dramatic love story, he is all himself againparticularly at the end, where the hero engages in a duel on deck in the night during a frightful storm, and his antagonist catches the lightning on his uplifted sword and is killed, thus saving the hero from the unpleasantness of killing tbe husband of the woman he loves.

All Around The Moon, first published in 1870, is the sequel to Vernes novel From the Earth To The Moon. The three passengers of the Columbiad space gun take off to their five-day journey to the moon. On their way to the moon and back, the astronauts face a lot of adventures and mishaps. Finally all hope seems lost when their projectile starts to fall towards the earth from more than 160.000 miles ...

This time Mr. Vernes novel is set in beautiful Norway. The wealthy schoolfriend of schoolmaster Malarius discovers that Erik, one of his students, is actually an orphan and was raised by a local fisherman. He takes the bright, young lad to Stockholm and tries to find out where the roots of his mysterious life lay ...

A story from the untiring pen of Jules Verne has always been welcomed from a very wide circle of readers. No one that we ever knew has yet tired of the wwards works. He takes his characters through the wildest and most improbable (to say no more) incidents, and yet he describes everything as though it were not only probable, but actually true, and while we are deep in one of his stories we believe everything that we read. Captain Antifers father had befriended an Egyptian prisoner at Ja, Ramylk lasha, and many years after he received a mysterious document naming latitude 24 degrees 59 minutes north, and saying that the longitude would follow later. It never did; but Antifer succeeded in discovering it, and had a series ofmost exciting adventures in searching for the wealth which was to be found on the spot indicated. The story, which is thrillingly interesting from beginning to end, is lavishly illustrated.

Jules Vernes conceptions are as brilliant as ever. Dr. Sarrasin, a French savant, simple in taste and absorbed in science, delivers an address at the Brighton Scientific Association. The publication of it with his name in The Daily Telegraph discovers him to a London lawyer as the lost heir of the Begum, whom his uncle had married in India. He inherits a moderate property of twenty-one millions sterling, all ready for him in the Bank of England. Dr. Schultz, a German professor, also a connection by marriage, threatens to dispute it. They settle the dispute by dividing it. Dr. Sarrasin founds in the Rocky Mountains a city of health, modelled on Dr. Richardsons lines. Dr. Schultz founds at thirty miles distance a stupendous cannon manufactory. One piece fires a shot with a velocity and force that give it perpetual motion. He resolves to destroy Dr. Sarrasins city. How he fails and perishes by his own science the story must tell ; but it is prodigious. The magnificence and the verisimilitude are perfect.

In the Mysterious Island Jules Verne offers to the lovers of the wonderful in literature his most elaborate, attractive, and instructive work. The escape of the voyagers from Richmond in their stolen balloon, and their wreck upon an Island in the Indian Ocean, are incidents in the career of Mr. Vernes heroes which have been made familiar to all readers of magazine literature; but the elaborately ingenious methods by which they wrested from this uninhabited island the means of subsistence, and the appliances through which they effected their deliverance, exhibit a wonderfully accurate knowledge of the capabilities of science. Briefly, the "Mysterious Island" is a new Robinson Crusoe, with all the modern improvements.

This attractive digital edition of one of this prophetic writers last and most imaginative books is a companion volume to his aeroplane-prediction romance "Robin the Conqueror." In this story, the scenes of which are laid in America, there is a machine, a sort of hydro-aeroplane. "The Terrible," that travels on the land like an automobile, under the water like a submarine, on the surface like a motor boat and in the air like an aeroplane...

Jules Verne, in this chief of his works, has set himself to tell the story of all the most stirring adventure of which we have any written recordto give the history, "from the time of Hanno and Herodotus down to that of Livingstone and Stanley," of those voyages of exploration and discovery which are among the most exciting episodes in the history of human enterprise. The wonderful journey of Marco Polo; the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama; the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro; the old Arctic discoveries; the explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in North Americathese exploits form a worthy subject for the most ambitious work of such a writer; and when he brings to the treatment of such material all the dash and vivid picluresqueness of his own creations, it may be imagined that he makes a book worth reading.

In "Mathias Sandorf" we have certainly a most pretentious volume containing over a hundred illustrations, in which the most tragic events of this most tragic story are graphically portrayed. Indeed so numerous and effective are the illustrations that it is almost possible to follow the bent of the story without the aid of the letter-press. On this occasion the localities to which we are introduced are chiey the towns and cities of Southern Europe and the islands of the Mediterranean, while the romance in which they are made to play a part, abounds in all those elements of mystery, adventure, and hair-breadth escape by which the author knows so well how to engage and maintain the interest of his reader. As is common to most of Jules Vernes works, the marvels of science are made the medium for some of the most effective incidents in the story, and we are not altogether surprised when at the conclusion of this most exciting narrative, the islet of Kencraf, with the three villains of the story, is blown into space by the accidental pressure of the foot on an electric wire.

Jules Verne has not written a more sane and well-sustained story than this. The excellent descriptions of a wild region in Transylvania and the accounts of the homely ways and daily life of the shepherds and villagers give it an air of veracity not to be expected from this author. The mysterious castle is finely set among the cliffs in an almost inaccessible place. It has been the scene of tragedies, and now after having been long abandoned it is supposed to be the home of supernatural beings of diabolic power. After one desperate attempt to reach it the villagers are stricken with terror, and affairs are in a deplorable state when two travelers arrive. One of them, Count Franz, has reasons of his own for believing it to be the hiding place of a certain enemy of his. He sets out to ascertain, and the mystery of its magic powers is revealed by the fact that two men are using for their own purpose electric batteries and telephones. A tragic romance and the destiny of several individuals are complicated with the physical phenomena in a way that no one but the inventive and ingenious author would have thought of. The glimpses of life in a fascinating country too little known make the book worth reading.