Return to the Centre of the Earth Leskanich. The story is narrated by Patrick Stewart. Recording was delayed after Wakeman was hospitalised with a life threatening case of double pneumonia and pleurisy, and needed time to recover. Upon release, the album reached number 34 on the UK Albums Chart. In 1974, Wakeman released his second solo album "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", a concept album based on the same-titled science fiction novel by Jules Verne. It tells the story of Professor Lidenbrook, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans who follow a passage to the Earth's centre originally discovered by Arne Saknussemm, an Icelandic alchemist.
Jules Verne Claudel, Jean Cocteau, François Mauriac, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Julio Cortázar, Antoine Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Wernher von Braun, and Jack Parsons. He is credited with helping inspire the "steampunk" genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology. Ray Bradbury summed up Verne's influence on literature and science the world over by saying: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." Jules Verne Jules