Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the Loire River in Nantes, France.
His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney and Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe. He had one brother and three sisters.
When he was six, he was sent to a boarding school. The teacher, Mme. Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared 30 years ago. Mme Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise. This idea greatly influenced Verne and he would often bring it out in his books especially, The Mysterious Island, Second Fatherland and The School for Robinsons.
In 1847, he was sent to Paris to study law. The French Revolution broke out in 1848 and he had a ringside view.
He used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. He attended literary salons and met many writers.
He decided to quit his law and concentrate on his writing instead. He spend a lot of time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and geography.
In 1862 he met Pierre-Jules Hetzel and submitted his manuscript of Voyage en Ballon. It was published as Five Weeks in a Balloon in January, 1863.
Hetzel drew up a long-term contract in which Verne would give him three volumes of text per year, each of which Hetzel would buy outright for a flat fee.
Verne’s second novel for Hetzel, which was serialised was The Adventures of Captain Hatteras . saying in a preface that Verne’s works would form a novel sequence called the Voyages extraordinaires.
He is often referred to as the godfathe of steampunk (a genre of science fiction that has a historical setting and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology)
He died on March 24, 1905.
He is often referred to as the Father of Science Fiction. “I wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon, not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa. I always was greatly interested in geography and travel, and I wanted to give a romantic description of Africa. Now, there was no means of taking my travellers through Africa otherwise than in a balloon, and that is why a balloon is introduced.… I may say that at the time I wrote the novel, as now, I had no faith in the possibility of ever steering balloons…
