Robur is Verne arguing with his own first novel. Five Weeks in a Balloon, the book that made him, crosses Africa by lighter-than-air flight and treats the balloon as the future. Twenty-three years later he opens Robur the Conqueror in a Philadelphia balloonists' club, has Robur interrupt their meeting to tell them the balloon is a dead end, and spends the novel proving it with a heavier-than-air machine. The members he kidnaps to make the point are balloon enthusiasts of exactly the kind his own first book created. Filed MEDIUM: the connection is an author's reversal rather than a borrowing, and it reads as one only with the earlier book beside it, which is the case for recording it here.