Of all the generalisations about Jules Verne, one of the most tenacious and potentially restrictive is the assertion that he is the ‘father of science fiction’. Now, while it is legitimate and proper to see Verne's scientific narratives as having initiated a new type of literature, the term ‘science fiction’ usually connotes a futuristic, anticipatory style of writing, speculative in scope and content, which extends reality into imaginary worlds that might or might not be possible. Moreover, science fiction is often considered to be an American genre, and Verne's association with it risks making it easier to forget that he was in reality a French author. The received wisdom about Jules Verne is that, since he foresaw the innovations of modern technology and was in some sense ‘ahead of his time’ (whatever such a phrase might be construed to mean), he naturally finds his niche alongside the great science fiction writers of the twentieth century. However, this is a case of Verne being damaged by those very readers who admire him, for this well-intentioned process of repackaging all too easily overlooks his very significant formal, stylistic and narrative innovations, his experiments with multiple ironic voices, his wit, his ludic self-consciousness, and his sophisticated uses and manipulations of nineteenth-century scientific and positivist discourses. In fact, as I shall stress in the course of this study, Jules Verne's novels are based extensively on documented fact rather than on speculation about the future, and his deeply complex use of sources is a major part of his interest as a writer. Moreover, it has often been observed by critics that Verne seems more preoccupied with the past than he is with the future, and that many of his stories are allegorical quests for lost origins. This is nowhere more explicit than, for example, in Voyage au centre de la terre, which turns out not to be a departure to a brave new future at all, but rather a return to prehistory, as the travellers go downwards through the earth's crust and backwards in time to the evidence of ever earlier stages of the evolutionary process. No science fiction here, it seems – though there is science, and there is fiction.