Around The Moon, Jules Verne
Around The Moon, Jules Verne
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Around The Moon

Author: Jules Verne

Narrator: AI Voice Charles Owen

Unabridged: 6 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/07/2026


Synopsis

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. The cannon has fired. The projectile is in motion. And now, sealed inside their metal shell with a dog, three bottles of champagne, and an alarming number of unanswered questions, Impey Barbicane, Michel Ardan, and Captain Nicholl are hurtling through space toward the Moon — or rather, as a passing meteor is about to make clear, toward something in the approximate vicinity of the Moon.

Around the Moon, published in 1870 as the conclusion of the story begun in From the Earth to the Moon, is Jules Verne at his most scientifically serious and his most quietly honest. His three travelers observe the lunar surface through their portholes, calculate their trajectory, argue about philosophy, eject their dead dog through a porthole into permanent orbit, and discover — when the moment of landing arrives — that they will not be landing. The deviation from their planned course means they will circle the Moon and return to Earth, watching the surface they came to reach recede behind them.

This is not a failure. It is Verne refusing to invent a solution to a problem he had not solved — the problem of how a projectile without independent propulsion could decelerate enough to land — and choosing the honest ending over the triumphant one. They orbit. They observe. They return. They splash down in the Pacific and are recovered by an American naval vessel in a sequence so close to the actual procedures of the Apollo program, conducted ninety-nine years later, that the parallel has never stopped astonishing the people who notice it.

Precise, contemplative, and more interested in the texture of the journey than the glory of arrival — the rare sequel that deepens everything the first novel began.

About Jules Verne

French author Jules Verne was born in the port of Nantes in 1828. He later moved to Paris to study law. At age twenty-eight, he married Honorine de Viane, a young widow with two children. Verne published several plays under the tutelage of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. He made his living as a stockbroker until his first successful series, Voyages Extraordinaire, was published in 1863. Soon Verne's novels became enormously popular around the world. Without a scientific background or experiences as a traveler, Verne spent much of his time doing research for his books. However, when the logic of the story contradicted scientific knowledge, Verne took poetic license with science to serve his fast-paced adventures.

Verne's stories caught the spirit of the nineteenth century and its uncritical enthusiasm about scientific progress and invention. His works were often written in the form of a travel book taking the readers on fantastic voyages. Many of Verne's ideas have been hailed as prophetic, predicting some of the inventions that have changed our world, including the airplane, the submarine, and spacecraft. He published sixty-five novels, some twenty short stories and essays, thirty plays, an opera libretto and two geographical works.

In the first part of his career Verne expressed optimism about progress and Europe's central role in the social and technical development of the world. In Verne's later novels, the author's pessimism is reflected in the doom-laden fin-de-siècle atmosphere. In contrast to the adventurous spirit of his novels, Verne's personal life was relatively uneventful, with the exception of his surviving a murder attempt by his insane nephew. Verne died of natural causes in Amiens on March 24, 1905.


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