Jules Verne 31 min read

A doomed balloon ascent with a stowaway madman aboard, Verne's earliest tale of the fantastic, in a rare American translation.

This 1852 story ('A Drama in the Air') appeared in a Philadelphia magazine as one of the very first works Jules Verne published, a taut account of a balloon flight menaced by an uninvited passenger obsessed with aeronautical disaster. A fascinating glimpse of the future master of scientific romance at the outset of his career. Read it for the seed of Verne's imagination, aloft and in peril, before the great Voyages Extraordinaires.

In its time

Published in 1852, during the 1850s, fairy tale and moral fantasy for a mass reading public; the sensation novel stirs.

Reading it

31 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).