The Underground City is a novel about the fortunes of a mining community called Aberfoyle in Scotland. Simon Ford, along with his family live deep inside the mine. Ford has found a large vein of coal in the mine but must deal with mysterious and unexplainable happenings in and around the mine. 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.