Around the World in Eighty Days

The one Verne with no invented technology in it at all: Phileas Fogg wagers half his fortune that the world’s existing rail and steamship network can now be traversed in eighty days, and sets off with a French valet and a detective who is convinced he is a bank robber. The wager is only possible because the Suez Canal and the trans-India and trans-America railways had just been completed, which makes it the most infrastructure-minded novel on the list — a story whose entire plot is a timetable.

Context: a16z note the aftermath: “after the publication of Around the World in Eighty Days, several newspaper reporters did, in fact, manage to go around the world in less than 80 days.” That is the Verne pattern in miniature — he described a capability the world had just acquired and had not yet noticed.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — where this is listed, in the classics tier.
• Jules Verne — the author.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — the other three Verne titles on the list.
• Science Fiction — the genre, though this book contains none of it.