If you’re okay with the suspension of disbelief required for Jurassic Park or Project Hail Mary, you should be okay with this book (provided you can pretend that you live in the 1880s and aren’t sure if the earth is completely solid or not). Yes, his science fiction is heavy on the “fiction” in a way that might seem a bit ridiculous to modern readers with the benefit of modern science…but really only a bit. In Journey to the Center of the Earth, he references the great scientific minds of the day he talks about the geological history of Iceland and the earth’s crust he even gets into the origins of the planet. Verne was apparently a science nut who was known for his extensive research and grounding his novels in the latest scientific theories. It’s a great adventure story, but it’s also great sci-fi. But if you do, then imo this is a must-read-even if you’re someone who doesn’t typically read classics. If you don’t like rocks, or caves, or dinosaur fossils, this might not be a good pick.
It’s the kind of page-turner where I’d find myself reading too fast and have to go back to reread the last paragraph to make sure I don’t miss a single word.
I’m here to tell you that y’all are sleeping on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which I just finished and is probably the most fun, fast-paced, page-turning novel from the 1800s I’ve ever read-and it also happens to be fantastic hard science fiction. When it comes to classics from the 1800s, Reddit loves The Count of Monte Cristo…and not much else (sometimes I see Frankenstein or Dracula mentioned favorably, but that’s about it-that is, these are the classics I see mentioned alongside contemporary novels and outside of classics-focused threads). If you’re interested in reading Verne, the North American Jules Verne Society seems to be a reliable source for finding faithful translations, though they don’t review all of them.)
Note that early translations of Jules Verne’s work-the ones now in the public domain and unfortunately still reprinted by publishers- famously bastardized his novels by generously abridging them, cutting out the “boring” science, changing character names and backgrounds, and in some cases completely rewriting entire chapters by adding new content to insert some good old Victorian melodrama. (I read Frank Wynne’s translation, first published by Penguin in 2009, and would highly recommend it.
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