The Gun Club of Baltimore is surely the most famous Gun Club in the world - for did not this madly ambitious group launch a capsule from the Earth's surface up through the atmosphere, and then beyond, toward the Moon?

Now Barbicane and Nicholl's famous club is engaged in an absurdly massive project once again, a project of literally Earth-shaking proportions. Barbicane has purchased the northern polar ice cap -- for its thick veins of coal. And the plan is no less than to tip the Earth on its axis, to bring a temperate climate around the globe . . . and enable the mining of those valuable deposits!

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the genre of science-fiction. He is best known for his novels Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before navigable aircraft and practical submarines were invented, and before any means of space travel had been devised. He is the second most translated author of all time, behind Agatha Christie. His prominent novels have been made into films. Verne, along with H. G. Wells, is often referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction".