Free Jules Verne books start here, with 47 complete works in PDF. Born in Nantes in 1828 and writing until his death in 1905, this French novelist created the Voyages Extraordinaires, the series that took readers under the ocean and around the moon.
His novels shaped modern science fiction and adventure writing. Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, Phileas Fogg and his eighty day wager: Verne studied real engineering and exploration, then built stories around it.
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Science Fiction
Jules Verne Science Fiction Books
Verne wrote about space capsules, flying machines and future cities long before engineers could build any of them. These free Jules Verne books are the ones that earned him the name founding father of science fiction.
A gun club with nothing left to shoot at decides to fire a manned projectile at the moon, and the sequel follows the capsule the whole way there. Verne worked out the launch site, the escape velocity and the crew size decades before any space agency existed.
The direct sequel to From the Earth to the Moon, picking up with the capsule already in flight and its three passengers circling a world nobody had seen up close. Half adventure, half thought experiment in orbital mechanics.
A comet clips the Mediterranean and carries off a slice of the Earth, along with the people standing on it. What follows is a survival story played out on a runaway world with its own gravity, seasons and orbit.
Verne answers his own balloon novels with a heavier than air flying machine and the ruthless inventor who built it. The argument between propeller and balloon that drives the plot was the real aviation debate of the 1880s.
The late sequel to Robur the Conqueror, where the inventor returns with a machine that drives, sails, dives and flies. Darker and tighter than the original, and one of the last novels Verne finished.
The Baltimore Gun Club buys the Arctic and plans to tilt the planet with a single enormous cannon shot so the coal underneath becomes reachable. A comedy about engineers who never ask whether they should.
Verne wrote this in 1863 and his publisher refused it for being too bleak. It imagines a city of glass towers, elevated trains, calculating machines and electric light, where nobody reads anything any more.
A short story that follows a newspaper magnate through one ordinary day a thousand years from now, complete with video calls, piped news and weather on demand. Ten pages, and startlingly close to the mark.
A chemist invents an explosive powerful enough to settle any war, and pirates take him prisoner to get it. Verne wrote the weapon of mass destruction plot half a century before the physics caught up.
Two heirs split a vast inheritance and each builds a city with it, one designed around public health and the other around artillery. The result is Verne at his most political, and the first great dystopian city novel.
A visiting scientist offers to light a sleepy Flemish town with a new kind of gas, and the townspeople start losing their tempers. A short, funny piece of science fiction about an experiment run on people who never consented.
A ruined castle in Transylvania appears to be haunted by a dead opera singer, and the explanation turns out to be technological rather than supernatural. Published five years before Dracula, on the same mountain range.
Verne's first published story, in which a balloon ascent turns into a hostage situation thousands of feet above the ground. Short, claustrophobic, and the seed of every flight novel he wrote afterwards.
The ocean was Verne's favorite frontier, from the Nautilus prowling the deep to castaways rebuilding a whole civilization on a volcanic island. Expect shipwrecks, submarines and voyages that never go to plan.
Captain Nemo, the Nautilus and a voyage through every ocean on the planet, told by a naturalist who is half prisoner and half guest. The most famous thing Verne wrote and still the best place to start.
Five castaways land on an empty Pacific island with nothing and rebuild an entire civilisation from chemistry and first principles. It also closes the story of Captain Nemo, which makes it the payoff to two earlier novels.
A message in a bottle sends a rescue party the whole way around the thirty seventh parallel, across South America, Australia and New Zealand. The first book of the trilogy that ends with The Mysterious Island.
A fifteen year old apprentice inherits command of a whaling ship after the crew is lost, then discovers the course he has been given is a lie. A coming of age story that turns into a hard look at the slave trade.
A passenger keeps a diary as the ship under him catches fire, floods and slowly falls apart. The bleakest thing Verne ever published, and the one where the science fiction gives way to pure survival.
A crossing aboard the Great Eastern, the largest steamship ever built at the time, with a jealous husband and a duel unfolding among the passengers. Verne made the trip himself and put what he saw straight into the book.
A Glasgow shipowner races a fast steamer through the Union blockade to reach Charleston, with cotton on one side of the ledger and a rescue on the other. Short, fast, and built on real Civil War shipping.
A family floats down the Amazon on an enormous timber raft while a blackmailer travels with them holding a coded document. Part river travelogue, part cipher puzzle that the plot genuinely turns on.
Three keepers take up a posting on a rock at the far tip of South America, and wreckers get there first. One of the last novels Verne wrote, stripped down to siege and coastline.
A young woman refuses to marry until she has seen the green flash at sunset, and drags half of Scotland along on the search. Lighter than the rest of Verne, and closer to a romance than anything else he wrote.
A baby is found lashed to a buoy off the Norwegian coast, and twenty years later the boy sets out through the Arctic to find out who he is. Written with Paschal Grousset and rarely reprinted since.
Verne picks up the Swiss Family Robinson story and strands a new group of survivors on the same coastline. Mutiny, an open boat and an island that turns out to be less empty than it looks.
The first half of Verne's sequel to the Swiss Family Robinson, following the family after rescue finally arrives. Reads as a straight adventure and sets up everything The Castaways of the Flag pays off.
Phileas Fogg bets his fortune that he can circle the globe in eighty days and leaves the same evening. A chase story built on real steamship and railway timetables, and the tightest plot Verne ever wrote.
Three men cross Africa east to west by balloon, over territory no European had mapped. This was the first of the Voyages Extraordinaires and the book that made Verne a professional novelist.
A courier rides five thousand kilometres across Siberia carrying a message that cannot be written down, through a rebellion that wants him dead. Many readers rate it the best adventure novel Verne produced.
A reporter boards the first through train from the Caspian Sea to Peking and finds a stowaway, a corpse and a fortune in the freight car. Also published as Claudius Bombarnac, and one of Verne's funniest books.
A French circus family loses its savings in California and decides to get home the long way, by wagon across Alaska, the frozen Bering Strait and Siberia. Warm, strange and completely unlike the rest of the catalogue.
A Turkish merchant refuses to pay a small toll to cross the Bosphorus, so he travels the entire way around the Black Sea instead. This edition carries the first of the two volumes of the original English translation, which is the only part in the public domain online.
A bored rich man decides life is worthless, insures himself heavily and hires a friend to kill him, then changes his mind and has to outrun the contract. A chase novel that doubles as a comedy about wanting things.
A rich young man insists on seeing the world before he marries, and is shipwrecked on a Pacific island with his dancing master. The castaway story played for comedy, with a twist about who arranged it all.
A joint expedition sets out to measure an arc of the meridian across southern Africa, then war breaks out between their two countries mid survey. Verne turns geodesy into a story about whether science can stay neutral.
A Northern family farming in Florida during the Civil War is targeted by a neighbour who wants their land and their politics gone. Verne wrote it as a straight American war novel, with no invention in sight.
A Norwegian family pins everything on a lottery ticket recovered from a shipwreck while the man who wrote it is presumed dead. Small in scale, set entirely in the fjords, and unexpectedly moving.
An early short novel set in colonial Peru, where a Spanish marriage plot collides with an Indigenous uprising. Written before the Voyages Extraordinaires began and rarely found in print.
Verne sent his characters to the coldest and deepest places he could imagine, then went looking for the real explorers who did the same. Ice, darkness and the pull of the unknown drive every title here.
A coded manuscript sends a professor, his nephew and an Icelandic guide down a volcano and into a world of underground oceans and living fossils. The purest expression of what Verne did better than anyone.
A captain drives his crew towards the North Pole with an obsession that shades into madness, through pack ice, mutiny and starvation. The Arctic novel Verne wrote before anyone had actually reached the pole.
Verne wrote a direct sequel to Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, sending a ship south to find out what really happened. Half homage, half rebuttal, and the strangest book in the catalogue.
A trading post is built on the Arctic coast, and the ground it stands on turns out to be an ice floe that is drifting out to sea. One of Verne's best premises, and it is delivered without a wasted chapter.
A father and a fiancée sail north to look for a missing ship and end up wintering in the pack ice themselves. A short work that shows the Arctic material Verne would spend whole novels on later.
A Scottish coal seam thought to be exhausted is reopened, and an entire town grows in the caverns below ground. Also known as The Underground City, and a mining novel with a genuine mystery running through it.
Verne's history of exploration, opening with the ancient world and running through Marco Polo, the Portuguese navigators and the first circumnavigations. Nonfiction, heavily illustrated, and the research behind the novels.
The eighteenth century volume, covering Cook, Bougainville and the great Pacific surveys. Verne is writing as a historian here, and the maps and engravings carry as much of the story as the text.
The nineteenth century volume, following the push into Africa, central Asia and the poles by the explorers Verne was reading in the newspapers. The closest thing to a source list for the Voyages Extraordinaires.
Verne published more than sixty novels, and the ones gathered here are the core of his legacy. Writers, filmmakers and engineers have been borrowing from these Jules Verne books for a century and a half.
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