Voyage au centre de la Terre Reading Order

Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864) by Jules Verne is his third novel and arguably the most purely imaginative of the Voyages extraordinaires — the adventure set in the one space that was truly unknown to nineteenth-century science: the interior of the Earth. Professor Otto Lidenbrock, a Hamburg mineralogist, finds an old document indicating that an Icelandic volcano named Snæfellsjökull leads to the Earth's center, and descends with his nephew Axel and their Icelandic guide Hans. What they find is not the hot molten core of geological science but a vast underground world: an ocean lit by electrical discharge, prehistoric creatures, a forest of fossilized mushrooms, a beach of dinosaur bones, and eventually a human figure of prehistoric size tending a herd of mastodons. The novel is the founding text of the hollow-earth adventure, and its appeal is in the combination of scientific earnestness (Verne had read the geological literature carefully) and pure fantasy. Axel is the narrator and the reluctant adventurer — he wants to turn back at every obstacle, where his uncle goes forward with maniacal certainty — and the contrast between them creates the novel's modest human comedy within its grand geological framework.