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Whether "Back to the Future" or "Jurassic Park" - science fiction works are always enjoying great success.
All the adventures on time travel or with resurrected dinosaurs would have been unthinkable without the French Jules Verne, who was born on February 8, 1828.
He is considered the creator of an entire genre.
Although Verne became enthusiastic about writing early on, his life as a writer was not mapped out.
He spent his childhood in Nantes in the west of France.
But he seemed to get bored very quickly - at the age of eleven he tried to hire as a cabin boy and thus embark on his first trip.
The attempt failed.
But his enthusiasm for distant places haunted him into adulthood and became a recurring motif in his novels.
If it had been up to his parents, Verne would have taken over his father's legal practice.
And so he took up law studies in Paris.
It was there at the latest that he began to devote himself to writing.
The motifs of sea voyage and balloon flight were already in his first works - a nice change from the dry paragraphs of jurisprudence.
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After marrying a widow who had two children, Verne began working as a stockbroker.
However, he could not stop writing: in 1862 he published his first science fiction novel.
“Five weeks in a balloon” (originally “Cinq semaines en ballon”) was a breakthrough.
The balloon wreck from the novel “The Mysterious Island” published by Verne in 1874
Source: De Agostini via Getty Images
In “The Mysterious Island”, a group of Union soldiers who were captured in the American Civil War also flees with a balloon.
It crashes on an island in the South Pacific, which they call US President Lincoln in honor of Lincoln's Island.
There mysterious things happen to them - until the group can solve the mystery.
A blueprint for Verne's stories: In the years to come, he published the majority of his novels as serial stories in a youth magazine.
In addition, he devoted himself to science and technology.
The knowledge he gained from conversations with researchers he often processed in his works.
Often these contained futuristic motifs.
Among other things, Verne already dealt with space travel.
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His best-known novels include “Journey around the earth in 80 days” (Le tour du monde en 80 jours) from 1872, “Journey to the center of the earth” (Voyage au center de la Terre) from 1864 and “From the earth zum Mond ”(De la terra à la lune), which he published in 1865.
The books were all commercial successes and made the author a wealthy man.
Free of financial worries, he could finally afford the trips he had always dreamed of.
So he went on tours by train and ship within Europe and even to the USA.
On March 24, 1905, Jules Verne died a few days after suffering an attack of diabetes.
His son published many of his works posthumously and wrote his own novels under his father's name.
It is also thanks to him that this type of literature offers the possibility of escape when reality once again pushes you to the edge of the bearable.
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