Barbicane and Nicholl's famous Gun Club of Baltimore is engaged in a massive project. Barbicane has purchased the northern polar ice cap for its thick veins of coal and plans to tip the Earth on its axis change the climate around the globe that will enable the mining of those deposits! Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. He was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early 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 A Journey to the Interior of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.