Facing the Flag

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. The ultimate weapon. The tortured genius who created it. And the race to control a force capable of destroying civilization.
Thomas Roch, a brilliant French inventor, has created the Fulgurator—a weapon powerful enough to annihilate fleets, level fortifications, and obliterate cities from afar. It could make conventional warfare obsolete and allow its possessor to hold nations hostage.
Ker Karraje, a pirate hidden inside a Caribbean volcano, has seized Roch and his invention. Operating undetected by submarine, he plans to force Roch to reveal its secrets, then sell them to the highest bidder—or use the Fulgurator to terrorize nations into submission.
Simon Hart, a French engineer posing as Roch’s medical attendant, is taken captive with him. Hart must prevent the weapon from falling into criminal hands. But when Karraje destroys a warship and its crew to prove its power, the struggle becomes more than a contest between nations.
Who can be trusted with the power to annihilate others? What responsibility does an inventor bear for the destruction his work enables? And when such a weapon cannot be controlled, should it exist at all?
Published in 1896, decades before nuclear weapons made these questions terrifyingly real, Facing the Flag is one of Jules Verne’s most prescient novels. Its vision of mass destruction, deterrence, proliferation, and technological terror feels startlingly modern.
Yet the novel reflects the nationalism of its era: French control is treated as responsible, while rival possession is the true danger. Modern readers will recognize both Verne’s insight and his blind spot—the deeper threat may not be who controls such power, but that such power exists at all.
From the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea comes a gripping technological thriller and an unsettling early warning about weapons of mass destruction.