In Search of Castaways or The Children of Captain Grant

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828 - 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 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, not least because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, between the English-language writers Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare, and probably was the most-translated during the 1960s and 1970s. He is one of the authors sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction", as are H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. THE three books gathered under the title "In Search of the Castaways" occupied much of Verne's attention during the three years following 1865. The characters used in these books were afterwards reintroduced in "The Mysterious Island," which was in its turn a sequel to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." Thus this entire set of books form a united series upon which Verne worked intermittently during ten years. "In Search of the Castaways," which has also been published as "The Children of Captain Grant" and as "A Voyage Around the World," is perhaps most interesting in connection with the last of these titles. It is our author's first distinctly geographical romance. By an ingenious device he sets before the rescuers a search which compels their circumnavigation of the globe around a certain parallel of the southern hemisphere. Thus they cross in turn through South America, Australia and New Zealand, besides visiting minor islands.