
Topsy-Turvy
by Jules Verne
'Topsy-Turvy ' Summary
In the year of 189–, an international auction is organized to define the sovereign rights to the part of the Arctic extending from the 84th parallel, the highest yet reached by man, to the North Pole. Several countries send their official delegates, but the auction is won by a representative from an anonymous United States buyer.
After the auction closes, the mysterious buyer is revealed to be Barbicane and Co., a company founded by Impey Barbicane, J.T. Maston and Captain Nicholl — the same members of the Baltimore Gun Club who, twenty years earlier, had traveled around the Moon inside a large cannon shell. The brave gunmen-astronauts had come out of their retirement with an even more ambitious engineering project: using the recoil of a huge cannon to remove the tilt of the Earth's axis — so that it would become perpendicular to the planet's orbit, like Jupiter's.
That change would bring an end to seasons, as day and night would be always equal and each place would have the same climate all year round. The society's interest lay in another effect of the recoil: a displacement of the Earth's rotation axis, that would bring the lands around the North Pole, which they had secured in the auction, to latitude 67 north. Then the vast coal deposits that were conjectured to exist under the ice could be easily mined and sold. The technical feasibility of the plan had been confirmed by J. T. Maston's computations. The necessary capital had been provided by Ms. Evangelina Scorbitt, a wealthy widow and ardent admirer of Maston.
Book Details
Authors

Jules Verne
France
Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in an...
Books by Jules VerneDownload eBooks
Listen/Download Audiobook
- Select Speed
Related books

Muerta Enamorada by Theophile Gautier
La Muerta Enamorada es un cuento romántico que explora la delgada línea que separa la vida y la muerte, el sueño y la realidad. La obra de Gautier es...

Terror Out of Space by Leigh Douglass Brackett
On the enigmatic planet of Venus, a sudden surge of cosmic activity triggers an inexplicable wave of madness among its inhabitants. As Lundy, a season...

Exploits Of Elaine by Arthur B. Reeve
The Exploits of Elaine is a thrilling mystery novel that follows the story of Elaine, a young woman who enlists the help of a detective to find the mu...

Return to Gone-Away by Elizabeth Enright
It continues the story of Portia Blake and her cousin Julian Jarman as they return to the abandoned lakeside community they discovered the previous su...

Zwierciadlana zagadka by Deotyma
The novel "Zwierciadlana Zagadka" follows the story of Cezary, a impoverished man who claims to be working on a revolutionary invention. The narrativ...

God's Country—And the Woman by James Oliver Curwood
James Curwood wrote many adventures of the far north. By 1909 he had saved enough money to travel to the Canadian northwest, a trip that provided the...

Dead Letter by Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
Published in 1866, "The Dead Letter" is a pioneering American crime fiction novel. It follows Richard Redfield, a clerk in the Dead Letter Office, who...

Old Broadbrim into the Heart of Australia or, A Strange Bargain and Its Consequences by St. George Henry Rathborne
Old Broadbrim, the famous Quaker detective listened as one of the richest men in New York continued "......I want you to guard my person for one year,...

The Man Who Hated Mars by Randall Garrett
On the desolate, crimson expanse of Mars, where the sun casts eerie shadows and the wind whispers secrets, a man haunted by his past finds himself emb...

Love and Freindship by Jane Austen
In the world of Regency-era England, where social conventions and courtship rituals reign supreme, a delightful and witty tale unfolds - "Love and Fre...
Reviews for Topsy-Turvy
No reviews posted or approved, yet...