Jules Verne's Lost Novel

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 It remained unpublished for 131 years, until it was recovered from a family safe and finally appeared in France in 1994.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…