But in his imagination, Verne was a very different proposition, and he wrote a long series of novels of fantastic adventures usually based around some futuristic discovery, possessing a remarkable scientific twist at the end. Some were quite plausible adventures like Around the World in Eighty Days or The Children of Captain Grant.     Many were historical romances as unhistorical and very romantic as most others of the genre. Some were downright preposterous yarns—like Off on a Comet or Journey to the Centre of the Earth; some carried grim warnings of things to come like Master of the World which had the idea right but not the method. And some were astonishingly close to truth for even though his astronauts in From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon were shot out of a cannon, he got the number of astronauts, the weight and size of the vessel, its speed and the effects of weightlessness and the purpose of the mission all extraordinarily close to those of actual Apollo mission a hundred years later. He also reckoned it would be achieved by Americans at a time when the British or French seemed far more likely, and that the launch would take place from Florida.
        But there was one work that stood out from them all, for it carried all of the qualities of the other works, and that was 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.
        The book was written in 1870 when the idea of a submarine ship was just plain silly. Since 1578, various attempts to allow men to survive extended periods underwater had been tried and universally failed and most of the would-be inventors drowned. Then Verne wrote his tale of Captain Nemo and his remarkable Nautilus and within fifteen years there was a working model invented in Sweden, and in another thirty years the German U-boat fleet was the terror of the seas. For Verne did not just write that a submarine boat might exist, but also how it would exist, how it would work and what it would be used for.