The ‘Journey to the Center of the Sun’ is an 1868 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. He was following on the success of his earlier adventure novel ‘The Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ and used the same main characters. The story again involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are plasma tubes going toward the centre of the Sun. At the interior of the sun the professor theorized that the balance of gravity and anti-gravity would produce and essentially Earth like space with temperate climates and breathable air. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans use an American designed steam rocket made to fit the world’s largest cannon and they are launched toward the planet Mercury to make their approach to the Sun.

The team encountering many adventures, including preposterous animals and otherworldly hazards, before eventually coming to the back to Earth where they crash land on the Moon and construct a balloon that allows them to string a steel cable from the Earth to the Moon. The last bit of anti-matter the professor has in his snuff box powers the 250,000 mile flight. In the vacuum of space the adventurers simply hold their breath for the speedy trip. The men ride home in a straw gondola basket eating the last sticks of French bread and drinking their last bottle of wine. The gondola docks in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano where they had ended up in the last book.

The genre of spaceflight fiction already existed long before Verne. However, Journey considerably added to the genre’s popularity and influenced later such writings. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs explicitly acknowledged Verne’s influence on his own Pellucidar series.