Verne, Jules Gabriel (L)

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) was the French novelist credited with ‘inventing’ science fiction. It is claimed that his 1870 classic, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, in which the lost city of Atlantis is featured, is said to have inspired Ignatius Donnelly to undertake his researches that led to the publication, in 1882, of his own foundational work, Atlantis:The Antediluvian World. It is also suggested that Donnelly’s second catastrophist work, Ragnarok, was also prompted by another of Verne’s novels – Off on a Comet.

The last book published before his death was L’Invasion de la mer, only recently translated into English as Invasion of the Sea^[779]. It was based on an actual suggestion by a French geographer that the chotts of Algeria and Tunisia should be reconnected with the Mediterranean at the Gulf of Gabes. These chotts or salt lakes are reputed to have been the location of the legendary Lake Tritonis and considered by some to have included the port of Atlantis. Alberto Arecchi has proposed that Lake Tritonis was the original ‘Atlantic Sea’.