Complete and unabridged, with 2 full-page plates by Friedrich Kohlund and Edward Frederick Skinner. A fragment of the earth is carried off by a comet with thirty-six people on it, who work out what has happened by measuring their own weight and the length of a day. Verne treats the impossible premise as a physics problem and follows it exactly — orbits, temperatures, provisions — which makes the two years aboard Gallia stranger than any adventure. The return is the one place he cheats, and readers have argued about it ever since. Its 77 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.