Verne was a genius! | Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel

Verne as prophet rather than novelist | Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel | Jules Verne, Richard Howard

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	• Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel Jules Verne, Richard Howard Del Rey, 1997 - 222 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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Jules Verne - Visionary Prophet

If you are a Jules Verne fan, this recently (1989) discovered novel, written at the beginning of Verne's career (1863), rejected by his publisher, and found in a locked safe by his great-grandson, is a must read.

Although Verne's later works (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days) contain numerous examples of his uncanny knack for prediction, such as modern space, air, and sea travel in rockets, airplanes, and submarines, no other work of his combines all these elements along with a prophetic description of modern industrial, capitalist society, and its attendant anomie and atomisation of the individual.

Set nearly one hundred years in the future from the date of its writing, the protagonist, 16-year old Michel Dufrenoy, has recently graduated with honors from a Parisian college with a major in classic literature in a world where classic art and literature have been forgotten, and only scientists, engineers, and accountants are valued and can find work.

In this remarkably prescient novel, Verne accurately and in amazing detail foresees a modern, technologically advanced Paris of the 1960's. Its citizens ride in gasoline powered automobiles and pneumatic subways, live and work in modern apartment buildings and skyscrapers, and use electric lights, fax machines, air conditioning, the Internet, television, and calculators. Verne mentions a structure remarkably similar to the Eiffel Tower fourteen years before its construction and, in what must be his most eerily precise prediction, a geometric centerpiece for the courtyard of the Louvre Museum, which would not be added until 1989.

The novel, written when Verne was 35, parallels his own early career. Dufrenoy is obviously based upon Verne himself, and represents Verne's own fears and frustrations as a young writer, when he abandoned the path his father had set for him as a lawyer and took up writing and theater instead.

Perhaps the best aspect of the work is Verne's description of a modern, technologically advanced, materially prosperous and peaceful society plagued by shallow relationships between individuals, trashy and lowbrow mass entertainment, and the marginalization of those whom society has deemed, due to their more romantic and bohemian notions and tastes, unfit for participation in the larger culture.

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Verne was a genius!

Just finished reading it for the first time, and would (highly) recommend it to anyone.

I wonder what Verne would write were he alive today, looking at the world as it exists now.

He would no doubt prompt us to look at things in ways we might not otherwise.

He was a truly gifted writer, thinker and social observer.

Verne as prophet rather than novelist

This was a long-lost Manuscript of Verne's; it was his second science fiction novel and one of his most pessimistic (probably because he had not yet achieved his full success in life). It was never fleshed out into a full length novel due to its lack of commercial prospects (his publisher rightly assumed that people were looking for more positive views of the future in his day, just as his positive visions of the future are unlikely to become best sellers today) Via extrapolation of the technology and social conditions of his day, he managed to make any number of amusingly accurate predictions as to how the future (1960s paris) would look. "The future," in fact, looked an awful lot like he said it would. Lots of high rises, international trade causing more world harmony, lots of "service industry" dominating the economy, huge universities (something that was not at all obvious in his day), elevators, keyboard computers, the end of classics and rhetoric as the central feature of higher education, fax machines, cars, industrialization of the arts, the metro: all predictions which more or less came true.

Of course, his metro was above ground like the T in Boston rather than the underground metro they have in Paris today. And his cars ran on compressed air and "carbolic acid" and such. And while weapons of mass destruction "rendered war ridiculous, and France finding it laughable, disarmed," war isn't so ridiculous that France has disarmed completely.

Amusing things he missed: ball point pens, databases, "industrialization" of pop culture, and the manner in which the arts became barbarous. He was convinced that all artistic things in the future would be machine-like; frankly I think that machine-art is one of the few areas in which modern art occasionally remains interesting or relevant. The main character of this novella was a sort of hippy, except that instead of cultivating the childish nonsense that hippies did in the 1960s, his character cultivated latin poetry.

I think people read a lot more into his "prophecies" than was appropriate. This was apparently a runaway best-seller in 1994 Paris. I would imagine that lots of pious french types read a lot into his predictions, moaning that it was as bad as he said and worse. In fact, life in the 1960s were a lot worse and a much, much better than Verne predicted. It was worse in that, instead of global trade issuing a new era of peace and making armies irrelevant, trade has really only made war between the western european nations unnecessary. Quite an accomplishment after countless millenia of slaughter (Europe has not been as peaceful as it is now since the Roman empire). It was worse in that, instead of poetry named "electric harmonies" and music called "a grand fantasy on the liquefaction of carbonic acid" we had the insipid poetry of Alan Ginsberg and Maya Angelou (or whatever the French were reading), and the vulgar, grody pop music of Serge Gainsbourg and the Monkeys. It was much better in that, while the old arts of opera, drama, painting, novels, symphony and so on are not "pop-art" as they were in the old days, but they are still well-supported hobbies of the bourgeoise and upper classes. It is much better in that, instead of starving all the people who could not deal with soul-killing 30 hour work weeks as happened in Verne's book, socialistic government agencies kept enough such idle people around to have street riots in 1968 and cause the downfall of the 4th republic (Verne assumed it would be an empire of Napoleon IV).
OK, maybe that part wasn't so much better.

It was better in that bestsellers were not "on the lubrication of driveshafts" but were "a history of sexuality by foucault" (one could read that as another form of driveshaft lubrication). I would imagine most of his 1994 I would imagine most of his 1994 readers were not as choked up as Verne was on the loss of the tradition of the duel on the champs de mars and ancient martial traditions: though I rather share his sentiments; as his lead character quotes Stendhal, "fighting ennobles the soul."

A cute little read.

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Interesting, but Unexpected

Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, hailed and widely publicized as "The Lost Novel" when it was discovered in 1989 and published in English in 1994, is valuable to the history of science fiction literature, but is not necessarily what one would expect from a Jules Verne novel. This particular text was written in 1863 and submitted for publication following the success of Verne's first published story, Five Weeks in a Balloon. His publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, rejected the novel on the basis that it presented such a pessimistic view of the future that it would only harm the author's growing reputation as the writer of exciting adventure stories.

Paris in the Twentieth Century is certainly dystopic in nature. It presents a future world replete with technology, but devoid of culture. In fact, artists, writers, musicians, and other scholars as we know them today have no place in this highly structured, government controlled society. Our protagonist, the teenaged Michel Dufrenoy, fits into this category. He worships at the altar of the great French writers and philosophers of old, but the names of his gods are virtually unknown and entirely unimportant in the world of the future. Unfortunately, the character of Michel remains relatively undeveloped throughout the text: from his introduction, through his continued disillusionment, and finally his melodramatic "death" in a cemetery, he grows little and entertains less. The plot is also unlike the plots of other Verne works; this book does not have much in the way of action, and doesn't present the sort of adventurous journey that we have come to expect from Verne through his other works, like Journey to the Center of the Earth or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

However, the text is perhaps unintentionally made more interesting through the accuracy of Verne's predictions of future technology. Among other things, Verne describes gasoline-powered automobiles, a public metro system with elevated trains, computer-like devices, global communication networks similar to the Internet, military weapons, public electric lighting, commercial advertising, global financial markets, fax machines . . . the list goes on and on, even including predictions of modern electronic music. While there are certainly some elements that miss the mark (pianos that convert to both dining tables and commodes?), Verne produces a vision of the future that, from the modern perspective, is largely believable. Overall, Paris in the Twentieth Century is worth a read, not only for Verne fans and science fiction buffs, but also for anyone who is interested in the development of the modern novel and the portrayal of the artist repressed by his society.

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THE LITERARY DISCOVERY OF THE CENTURY

In 1863 Jules Verne, famed author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, wrote a novel that his literary agent deemed too farfetched to be published. More than one hundred years later, his great-grandson found the handwritten, never-before published manuscript in a safe. That manuscript was Paris in the Twentieth Century, an astonishingly prophetic view into the future by one of the most renowned science fiction writers of our time . . .

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