Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Bantam Classics)

A proto-science fiction masterpiece about a daring mission into the bowels of the Earth, with an introduction by award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson The intrepid Professor Lindenbrock embarks upon the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century: a journey down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the Earth’s very core. In his quest to penetrate the planet’s primordial secrets, the geologist—together with his quaking nephew Axel and their devoted guide, Hans—discovers an astonishing subterranean menagerie of prehistoric proportions. Jules Verne’s imaginative tale is at once the ultimate science fiction adventure and a reflection on the perfectibility of human understanding and the psychology of the intrepid. As Kim Stanley Robinson notes in his introduction, though Verne never knew the term “science fiction,” Journey to the Center of the Earth is “one of the early examples of a genre . . . science fiction, no doubt about it.”