Whipped up by Charles Darwin's new perspective on life and by visions of lost worlds conjured up by Jules Verne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that was an age of discovery.

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Spurred on by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne often included in the texts didactic technical explanations of how his inventions worked.

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He moved on to the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, the Tarzan and Martian adventures by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the classic science fiction of Jules Verne and horror of Edgar Allan Poe.

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