Paris au XXe siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century) by Jules Verne.

Pierre-Jules Hetzel believed that Paris in the Twentieth Century is much worse in quality than Five Weeks in a Balloon and considered, from a commercial point, that the author’s fictional view of a future doesn’t resolve there any put issues of a real one. The publisher thought that none of readers would believe it because wouldn’t have an interest. Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century was considered as the lost novel until 1989, when author’s great-grandson Jean Verne did cleaning the family house and detected the manuscript in a trunk. It was published five years later.

The book is set from August 1960 to winter 1961. Verne depicts a dark future for Paris from the very beginning, such as a metro station located on what was the Champ de Mars. He makes a merciless look at what happened to the city and society. His characters despise the past in which the book was written. He wants to shock till printing an inflation number for how much was spent on a university dinner. The author’s vision of the future is extreme and exaggerated, including lengths of metro lines, which are 32, 56 and 100 kilometers and extend beyond the French capital (in nowadays reality, the longest Line 14 has 27 kilometers). No hesitation in that an idea originated from Napoleon III’s reconstruction of Paris.

Verne is meticulous obsessed with this depiction. If real facts always committed a detrimental to his plots, that does fiction ones. As it was before, this always troubled a story, moving it into unauthentic. I didn’t get live in the story and personages in Paris in the Twentieth Century. It reads to the second chapter as Verne’s article on how the future will look, not as fiction. The Frenchman forgot that he was writing a novel, describing a locomotive’s work in his metro system. That perceives as mocking his embedding of an “author’s note” there. He returns to his hero but doesn’t linger more and describes streets lamps to which he sees as important to mention under which fictional corporation they control.

He letters about a real locomotive appeared in 1859. And concludes with the obvious that people of his time would be surprised by that future, while it’s mundane for people of that time. Chapter Two was the final one here.

If I did recalling of fantasy, elegant depiction of the uncharted in science and alien form, and a beautiful story of Herbert Wells’ The First Men in the Moon in reading From the Earth to the Moon, I thought about a competent embedding of describing of future into narrating of The Sleeper Awakes by this named English writer when I was watching on strokes of Paris in the Twentieth Century.

Verne doesn’t amaze in his look to the future. He was right about what was guessable already then: the metro that had just appeared in England, movement of locomotives on boulevards, electricity in every house, and, as additionally, an increase of population creates respective inquiries and solutions shouldn’t also surprise. At the large rest of his vision, Pierre-Jules Hetzel was precise. Verne always misfires. He does that with saving customs of his time, such as monarchy and a greeting without a physical contact, in which a mademoiselle shows a curtsy.

The storyline itself is following for a hero who acts recklessly in this deliberately lightless future, which respectively heads to a predictably bad ending. Verne never could become a serious writer.