This provocative new study contends that Jules Verne was indeed more than just a writer of science fiction or harmless fantasies for children. Placing him squarely within the center of a strong literary tradition, Martin convincingly shows that a recurrent narrative, describing the strange destiny of a masked prophet who revolts against an empire, runs throughout Verne's Voyages extraordinaires. This theme, Martin argues, illuminates the paradoxes of realism and invention, repression and transgression, and imperialism and anarchy. Verne emerges not only as a key to the political and literary imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but as a model for fiction in general.