Jules Verne 3 hr 50 min read

A brilliant, unstable inventor of a devastating new weapon is kidnapped by a pirate genius who means to use it to hold the world's navies to ransom.

This is Jules Verne's 1896 'Facing the Flag' (Face au drapeau), a taut techno-thriller of super-weapons, piracy, and patriotism, in an early English translation. Suspenseful, prophetic scientific romance. Read it for a gripping Verne tale of a doomsday device and the loyalty that stands against it, from the master of the genre.

In its time

Published in 1896, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

3 hr 50 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).