Jules Verne's Lost Novel
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
以下正文同步自 Hacker News，版权归原站所有，已转换为易读排版。
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
ListenAudio VersionTranslate
Paris at sunset. Adobe Stock.
In 1863, Jules Verne did something he would almost never do again. He looked not toward an undiscovered island, the bottom of the sea, the interior of the Earth or the far side of the Moon, but directly into the future. He imagined Paris almost a century ahead, in the year 1960, and asked what sort of civilization the nineteenth century might become if its faith in science, machinery, commerce and efficiency were allowed to run to its logical conclusion. The result was Paris in the Twentieth Century, a book so unlike the Verne we came to know that his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, refused to publish it. Hetzel thought the prophecy implausible and the tone too bleak. Verne put the manuscript away. It remained unpublished for 131 years, until it was recovered from a family safe and finally appeared in France in 1994. We commonly describe Verne as a great…
John Steele is the Publisher and Executive Editor of Blue Continuum.
FacebookXRedditBlueskyCopy link
Recommended stories
EarthRemembering the Future: Blade Runner
More human than human.
How civilization learned to mine energy — and now knowledge.
One coherent view of the natural world and our place in it.
正文由 探How 从来源站点 RSS 同步，内容未经改写；遇到排版缺失或需要图片、视频时请以原文为准。