What a stunning discovery: an old, coded note that actually contains directions for reaching the Earth's very core! And once he finds it, renowned geologist Professor Liedenbrock can't resist setting out with his 16-year-old nephew to go where only one man has gone before. Jules Verne takes young readers on one of the most incredible journeys ever imagined, from Iceland's frozen tundra far down into fantastic underground prehistoric worlds and back up again through the fires of an erupting volcano.
If you want to include a little magic with your modern-day adventures, I -highly- recommend this book. There is some great background material here on Voodoo, as well as some fantastic material on the "Shadow War" between things of the fantastic and things of the "real" world. You'll be wondering whether this could really be true by the time you finish this book. I'd like to see a well-run GURPS: Voodoo campaign just to see how close it would be to "X-Files".
Most readers know Capain Nemo only as the enigmatic protagonist of Jules Verne's classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But what if Nemo was a real man, whose actual life was more fantastic and adventurous than all the fictions it inspired?
Fantasy is a creation of the Enlightenment and the recognition that excitement and wonder can be found in imagining impossible things. From the ghost stories of the Gothic to the zombies and vampires of twenty-first-century popular literature, from Mrs Radcliffe to Ms Rowling, the fantastic has been popular with readers. Since Tolkien and his many imitators, however, it has become a major publishing phenomenon.
Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.
