The first of what came to be grouped together as his Voyages extraordinaires was Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), which, after some years of struggle, launched his career as a commercially successful writer. Verne was impassioned by travel, by exploration, by motion, by all means of transportation and locomotion. The sense of excitement communicated by Verne more than half a century ago is with me still. The vast underwater world is full of wonders, and we have hardly begun to explore them. I continue to be enthralled by submarine photography, by tales of giant squid and underground lakes, by shipwrecks and desperate voyages. It inspired in me a passion for stories of underwater adventures, even more thrilling to me than travels in space and moon landings. I loved this book, and read it again and again. I was introduced to Jules Verne at Christmas 1948 when my parents gave me a beautifully illustrated and cleverly abridged copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
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