The Earth Turned Upside Down
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In one of his best-known books, From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne described how a group of men in The Gun Club of Baltimore used a giant cannon to send a spacecraft to the moon. Now, in this sequel, the gun is brought into use again to achieve an equally ambitious aim - to tilt the earth's axis so that the North Pole is displaced to the Tropics. The plotters believe there are limitless resources of coal at the North Pole and their cunning plan will allow them to exploit these resources to become rich. In spite of its disregard for anything approaching scientific plausibility, this enjoyable book has a modern resonance in a world in which conserving energy is increasingly important, and the dangers of climate change - one huge consequence if the Gun Club's plot succeeds - are daily in the forefront of the news.
Jules Verne
Jules Verne (1828-1905) used a combination of scientific facts and his imagination to take readers on extraordinary imaginative journeys to fantastic places. In such books as Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, he predicted many technological advances of the twentieth century, including the invention of the automobile, telephone, and nuclear submarines, as well as atomic power and travel to the moon by rocket.
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Sophie Lewis
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Sophie Lewis has translated works from French and Portuguese by Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Leïla Slimani, Mona Chollet and Annie Ernaux, as well as Natalia Borges Polesso, João Gilberto Noll, Sheyla Smanioto, Victor Heringer and Patrícia Melo, among others. With Gitanjali Patel, she co-founded the Shadow Heroes workshops enterprise. Lewis's translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She was joint winner of the 2022 French-American Foundation prize for non-fiction translation, for Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild.
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