Paris in the Twentieth Century

This "lost" manuscript by Jules Verne—his second book—was written in 1863 but published for the first time in 1994. In it, he imagines a 20th-century Paris in which art and culture have declined in the face of increasingly oppressive feats of engineering and overwhelming economic concerns. Among Verne's accurate depictions of 20th-century technology are machines such as electronic calculators, automobiles, subway systems, and fax machines—not to mention many other complicated devices that have not yet been invented.