Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French writer and futurist. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells. Verne is credited with helping inspire the steampunk genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology.

His notable works include:
 * Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) - the innovation was the concept of a prehistoric realm still existing in the present-day world. This subterranean fiction inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his novel The Lost World.
 * From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon (1865) - predicted the details of the mission that sent astronauts to the moon more than 100 years later in 1969, like the size of the space capsule to within a few percent, the location of the launch site in Florida not far from Cape Canaveral, the number of astronauts on the mission, the length of time the voyage would last, the weightlessness that the astronauts would experience, and the final splashdown in the ocean.
 * Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) - its depiction of Captain Nemo's underwater ship, the Nautilus, is regarded as ahead of its time, since it accurately describes many features of today's submarines, which in the 1860s were comparatively primitive vessels.
 * Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) - at the time, an unheard-of circumnavigation of the world in 80 days
 * Paris in the Twentieth Century (1994 - found by his great-grandson 130 years later) - predicted that Paris in 1960 would have glass skyscrapers, air conditioning, TV, elevators, high-speed trains, gasoline-powered automobiles, fax machines, and even something resembling the Internet.