VOYAGE BENEATH THE WAVES was published two years prior to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne, when he became aware of Jules Rengade's serial version, felt obliged to write the magazine editor to set the record straight--HE'D developed the idea independently In fact, the influence was very much the other way around: although Rengade had come up with the idea of an imaginary voyage of submarine exploration separately, he'd modeled his narrative style on Verne's, thus producing the first "Vernean" novel written by someone other than the great man himself. This is the first fictional use of a man-made submersible to explore the ocean depths--and it remains a very readable entry into the then-new genre of science fiction.