Paris in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au XXe siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in 1960, about 100 years in Verne's future, where society places value only on business and technology.
Written in 1863 but first published 131 years later (1994), the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced, but culturally backwards world. Often referred to as Verne's lost novel, the work, set in August 1960, paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological future civilization.
Many of Verne's predictions were remarkably on target. His publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, would not release the book because he thought it was too unbelievable, and its sales prospects would be inferior to Verne's previous work, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
Read more about Paris In The Twentieth Century: Plot Summary, Publication Deferred, Literary Significance and Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, paris, twentieth and/or century:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.”
—Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)
“The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Reasoning with a drunkard is like
Going under water with a torch to seek for a drowning man.”
—Tiruvalluvar (c. 5th century A.D.)