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Originally Posted by HarryT
Verne's an interesting one. Although he's widely considered today to be one of the "fathers of SF", what he basically wrote were books about travel. Those of his works we consider "science fiction" were simply travel to unusual places, or by unusual methods, as in "From the Earth to the Moon" or "20,000 Leagues under the Seas". The overwhelming majority of the 54 novels that comprise his "Voyages extraordinaires", or "Extraordinary Journeys", have no SF elements to them. In the words of Verne's editor, the purpose of his books was "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format, the history of the universe."
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True enough, though 20,000 Leagues did have a machine that was very much like a nuclear sub in it. I read one article about SF a long time ago which basically said that in the best SF stories, the SF elements were purely secondary and could have just as easily been a western, or sailing ship story.