Jules Verne's Publisher Rejected His Darkest Prophecy for 131 Years
Jules Verne's Lost Novel
In 1863 Jules Verne wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century, imagining a 1960 city of gas cabs, compressed-air trains, and calculating machines where literature is dead and only profit matters. Publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel found it too bleak and implausible, and the manuscript stayed in a family safe until 1994. Verne nailed the machines but underestimated Paris's cultural resilience—the year 1960 brought Sartre, Beckett, and Godard's Breathless.
Literature is dead, my boy. No one reads anymore; I am the guardian of a cemetery here, and exhumation is forbidden.
- Kotlopou
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this book is quite poorly written. But I think it's still enjoyable, in part because you can see the hand of the author pulling the strings so much that it becomes funny. I read an annotated version with context and comments from Verne's editor, and would recommend you to do the same if you're curious.
As an example, there's an entire chapter dedicated to Michel and his professor friend going through a long list of nineteenth-century authors and passing judgment on them. You would expect this to be the thinly disguised opinions of Jules Verne, but no, it's the thinly disguised opinions of Verne's editor, which Verne included in the hopes that it would help the book get published. Obviously, this was not successful.
I have a theory about Verne that's strongly based on this book. He is sometimes called a technological visionary, but most of the inventions of his books were already known at his time (the first submarine was made in 1620, Around the World in Eighty Days is likely based on an itinerary in a magazine Verne read, etc.), and what was not known, Verne often made work using lots of artistic license (like the giant gun from the Earth to the Moon, which would kill the passengers with the acceleration; Verne did not invent rockets). No, Verne's genius was that he took the progress that was already visible and used it to create adventures, that he created a vision of the future where all this technology is used to explore deep undergr […]
- WillAdams
It would have been more interesting if it had been published in 1991 so as to directly invite comparison to David Brin's _Earth_ in which that author did much the same (imagine life in the future), or not until 2012 so as to be contrasted with KSR's _2312_.
Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).
- chaostheory
> At the Grand Entrepôt Dramatique, plays are assembled like manufactured goods. One clerk handles expositions, another denouements, another entrances and exits. There is a clerk for rhyming couplets, a clerk for punch lines, a Department of Puns and a central office of jokes. Art has survived as an assembly line.
While is predictions are technology were way more accurate for the 1960s (his intended target), his predictions about society and culture are prescient for the 2020's with the advent of generative AI
> "With Montaigne and maybe Rabelais it was What Do I Know? In the nineteenth century it was What Does It Matter to Me? And nowadays we say: How Much Does It Earn?"
For me, this also summarizes the introduction of the Internet to the masses, all the way to the present day.