Jules Verne Trivia
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48 free Jules Verne trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Jules Verne trivia quiz covers the Frenchman behind Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days. The easy questions cover the famous titles, the birthplace on the Loire, the publisher who launched him, the nationality, the 'father of science fiction' tag and the astronaut who quoted him on the way back from the Moon. From there it moves through the life: the cabin-boy legend, the law degree his father demanded, the salons and Alexandre Dumas, the theatre secretary job, the Paris Bourse, the yachts all named Saint-Michel and the fifteen years as an Amiens town councillor. The harder end covers the rejected Paris in the Twentieth Century, the argument over Captain Nemo's nationality, the Hetzel contract of three volumes a year, the nephew who shot him in the leg, the notorious 1872 English translation, the Onze-sans-femme dining club, and his ranking between Agatha Christie and Shakespeare in the world's translation league table. Every answer was checked against Verne's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our science fiction and classic literature quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which port city on the Loire was Jules Verne born in 1828?
Nantes
Nantes put ships at his door: Verne recalled a boyhood fascination with the river's merchant vessels, and he and his brother Paul explored it in leaky boats right down to the sea.
Q 02Which Verne hero bets £20,000 that he can travel around the world in eighty days?
Phileas Fogg
Phileas Fogg stakes half his fortune on the bet and spends nearly all of the other half on the road, so winning leaves him hardly any richer than when he set out.
Q 03What is the name of Captain Nemo's submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?
Nautilus
Nautilus was a borrowed name: Robert Fulton had shown a real submarine called Nautilus to the French government around 1800, decades before Verne wrote his novel.
Q 04In From the Earth to the Moon, how do Verne's travellers leave the Earth?
Fired from a giant cannon
Fired from a giant cannon, because the men behind the plan are American artillerymen left idle when the Civil War ends. Their Baltimore club wants something new to shoot at.
Q 05In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which creatures attack the submarine and carry off a crewman?
Giant squid
Giant squid swarm the hull, and the crew climbs out to fight them on deck with axes. One sailor is dragged into the sea, and the narrator sees Captain Nemo in tears.
Q 06What subject did Verne's father send him to Paris to study in 1847?
Law
Law was the family trade, and his father expected him to take over the practice. Verne took the degree, then refused to come home, staying in Paris to write for the theatre.
Q 07The teenage Verne wrote verse tragedies in the style of which French writer, whose plays he said influenced him most?
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo excited him so much that he could recite whole pages of Notre-Dame de Paris by heart. Yet it was the plays, he said, that shaped him most.
Q 08In Around the World in Eighty Days, what does the hero buy in India when the railway line runs out?
An elephant
An elephant, bought at a ruinous price because its owner refuses to hire it out. The newspapers had wrongly reported the line across India as finished, which is what made the bet look safe.
Q 09Which famous author's son helped Verne revise his comedy The Broken Straws and get it staged in 1850?
Alexandre Dumas fils
Alexandre Dumas fils met Verne at twenty-one and took him up at once: they reworked the play together and he got it produced. Verne called him his first protector and never forgot the debt.
Q 10What is the name of the French valet who goes around the world in eighty days with his English master?
Passepartout
Passepartout leaves London in such a rush that he forgets the gas lamp in his room, and it burns for all eighty days. His master takes the bill out of his share of the winnings.
Q 11Why does Verne's round-the-world traveller win his bet after believing he has lost it?
Going east gained him a day
Going east gained him a day: by travelling towards the sunrise he saw one more dawn than the people who stayed in London. He learns it only when his valet goes to book a clergyman for a wedding.
Q 12From which US state do Verne's travellers set off in From the Earth to the Moon?
Florida
Florida qualified because the launch had to aim straight up at the Moon, which meant a site below the 28th parallel. Only it and Texas lay far enough south, and the two fought bitterly over the honour.
Q 13In Journey to the Center of the Earth, the explorers climb down into a volcano in which country?
Iceland
Q 21Under what series title did Verne's publisher issue his adventure novels from 1866?
Voyages extraordinaires
Voyages extraordinaires was announced in a publisher's preface promising that the novels would sum up all that modern science knew of geography, geology, physics and astronomy. His first three books were folded into the series afterwards.
Q 22How did Verne change the ending of Captain Hatteras at his publisher's request?
The hero survives instead of dying
The hero survives instead of dying in the volcano at the North Pole, as the first draft had it. In print he comes home alive but struck dumb by 'polar madness', and spends his days at an asylum walking one path, always towards the north.
Q 23Which pessimistic Verne novel did Hetzel reject as too subversive, leaving it unpublished until 1994?
Iceland holds the way down, or so says a coded note that drops out of an old manuscript. The right crater is marked only by a peak's shadow in the last days of June, so the professor has to race north.
Q 14The European Space Agency's cargo ship Jules Verne made a supply run to which destination in 2008?
The International Space Station
The International Space Station took delivery in April 2008 after the robot freighter docked itself with no pilot aboard. Five months later it left full of rubbish and burned up over the Pacific as planned.
Q 15What day job did Verne take when he married, writing early each morning before work?
Stockbroker
Stockbroker was the price of marriage: he wanted a secure income to win a widow with two young children. He later said the fever of the Paris exchange found its way into his novels.
Q 16What powers Captain Nemo's submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?
Electricity
Electricity does everything aboard: it drives the engines, lights the cabins and cooks the meals. Nemo makes it with sodium he extracts from seawater, so he never needs to put into port.
Q 17Which studio made the 1954 film of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason?
Disney
Disney shot the film's big sea-monster battle twice. The first take, staged as a calm sunset, looked wrong, so it was redone at night in a storm, which also hid the cables working the creature.
Q 18Which film scientist names his two sons Jules and Verne, after his favourite author?
Doc Brown
Doc Brown and his wife Clara share a love of the novelist in Back to the Future Part III, set in 1885. Their two boys turn up in the final scene aboard a time-travelling locomotive.
Q 19Which story of an expedition across Africa, published in 1863, was Verne's first novel?
Five Weeks in a Balloon
Five Weeks in a Balloon was, he said, a story about the continent and not about ballooning: a balloon was simply the only way to get his travellers across it. He had never been up in one.
Q 20Which French film pioneer turned Verne's lunar voyage into the 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon?
Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès was a stage magician who took up film after seeing the Lumière brothers' show, which is why his Moon trip is full of trick shots. Its spacecraft famously lands in the Man in the Moon's eye.
Paris in the Twentieth Century
His great-grandson found the manuscript in 1989.
Q 24Verne first wrote Captain Nemo as a nobleman of which nationality, out for revenge on Russia?
Polish
Polish, because Russia had just crushed the Polish uprising of 1863 and Verne was appalled. France needed the Tsar as an ally, so the publisher called the book unprintable and Nemo's past was left a dark secret.
Q 25In which Verne novel are escaped Civil War prisoners marooned by balloon in the Pacific, secretly helped by an ageing Captain Nemo?
The Mysterious Island
The Mysterious Island keeps its secret helper hidden almost to the end: medicine and rescues arrive from nowhere until the castaways find the old captain alone in his submarine. He dies aboard it, and it becomes his tomb.
Q 26As his novels began to sell, Verne bought three of what in succession, each grander than the last?
Yachts
Yachts took him to Scotland, Denmark and round the Mediterranean, and he said every one of his novels had benefited from those cruises. The man who sent his heroes round the globe never went round it himself.
Q 27Who shot Verne in the leg in 1886, leaving him lame for life?
His nephew Gaston
His nephew Gaston, who adored him, turned up one day muttering wildly, drew a revolver and fired. The bullet was never removed, and the young man, out of his mind, spent the rest of his life in asylums.
Q 28Which local office did Verne first win in 1888 and go on to win three more times?
Town councillor
Town councillor, and he meant it: one visiting journalist found a pile of proofs on one side of him and a report for the council on the other. He told another that friends thought him prouder of the post than of his literary reputation.
Q 29In which city on the Somme did Verne spend his last decades, dying there in 1905?
Amiens
Amiens is where he had met his wife, as best man at a friend's wedding. He left Paris for it because steady work and society did not mix, and said that little by little all his affections centred on the town.
Q 30Who oversaw publication of Verne's posthumous novels and was later found to have rewritten them?
His son Michel
His son Michel did far more than edit: comparing the manuscripts, researchers found he had recast plots, added characters and in most cases rewritten the books outright. The rebellious boy had become his father's ghost.