In Search of the Castaways

The three books gathered under the title In Search of the Castaways occupied much of Verne's attention during the three years following 1865. The characters used in these books were reintroduced in The Mysterious Island, which is a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In Search of the Castaways is Verne's first distinctly geographical romance. By an ingenious device, he sets before the rescuers a search that compels their circumnavigation of the globe along a certain parallel of the southern hemisphere. Thus they cross in turn through South America, Australia, and New Zealand, and visit several minor islands.

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. He was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels, including A Journey to the Interior of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.