In a series dedicated to the study of science fiction, it would seem to be more than appropriate to find a volume devoted to Jules Verne (1828–1905), who is widely credited as one of the founders of the genre. Numerous surveys of the evolution of science fiction pay tribute to his influence on successive generations of writers, with leading contemporary practitioners (such as Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke) extravagant in their praise of Verne's ‘fantastic’ explorations of worlds known and unknown. Verne classed his texts under the collective title Voyages extraordinaires, with a sub-title Les Mondes connus et inconnus, signalling the preoccupation with exploration and discovery, which has come to be seen as the characteristic feature of his fictional universe. The first issue of Hugo Gernsback's landmark SF magazine Amazing Stories in 1926 had a drawing of Jules Verne's tomb at Amiens on its title page. According to the purist, however, less than a quarter of his sixty-four novels could be counted as ‘genuine’ SF; and there has been much argument surrounding whether ‘scientific romance’ may not be a more suitable designation. Of course, the term ‘science fiction’ itself did not exist until the 1930s; and, as Patrick Parrinder points out, Verne should be considered alongside other writers of ‘scientific romance’ in the nineteenth century, such as Poe, Mary Shelley, and H. G. Wells, in charting the continuity between the nineteenth-century tradition of scientific romance and twentieth-century science fiction. Jules Verne's exploitation of the genre of the romance of adventure has profoundly affected the direction of science fiction. There has been as much debate concerning Verne's status within SF, as there has about his inclusion in the French literary canon. Nevertheless, it would be fair to state that in the popular imagination Verne and SF are seen as largely synonymous, even if modern science fiction has moved far beyond the narratives of travel and endeavour which are found in Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869). For the modern SF reader, Jules Verne's lunar novels—De la Terre à la lune (1865) and Autour de la lune (1869)—would appear somewhat quaint and technologically unsophisticated. However, as Andrew Martin states: ‘Verne is less an individual than a style, a symbol, a mythology.’