Michael Strogoff: Science Fiction Stories

Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.

Verne was born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.

Verne is the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between the English-language writers Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare; he probably was the most-translated during the 1960s and 1970s. In English he is one so-called father of science fiction, a title also given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.

Jules Verne appeared in Transformers: Rescue Bots series in the episode "Last of Morocco", where he is revealed to be the estranged friend of recurring series antagonist Thaddeus Morocco. He is also a time traveler, having discovered a means of moving through the ages using a device of his own invention and Energon, the power source of all Transformers. After being contacted by his old friend, Jules Verne travels to the present day and meets the Rescue Bots, and reveals that he has encountered other Transformers during his travels through time. At the time that he meets the series' heroes, he has not yet written 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but later becomes determined to do so after taking a trip in a submarine. In a paradox, Morocco has a submarine called the Nemo that he presumably named for Jules Verne's character, whom Verne presumably named after the adventure involving the submarine. As a result of the episode's events, Verne takes Morocco-whose memories have been erased so that he no longer remembers his villainous career-to the future to live.