The three books gathered under the title In Search of the Castaways occupied much of Verne's attention during the three years following 1865. The characters used in these books were reintroduced in The Mysterious Island, which a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In Search of the Castaways is Verne's first distinctly geographical romance. By an ingenious device he sets before the rescuers a search which compels their circumnavigation of the globe around a certain parallel of the southern hemisphere. Thus they cross in turn through South America, Australia and New Zealand, besides visiting minor islands. Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. He was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including A Journey to the Interior of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.