Literary Significance and Criticism
The appearance of Verne's lost novel caused a stir among modern critics, who mostly received the book warmly, greeting it as "prescient and plausible". On the other hand, some saw the book every bit as unnecessarily pessimistic about the future as did Verne's editor.
The book was a best seller in France, where it was heavily promoted before publication. Some critics were put off by the publisher's hype of the book, although most readily admitted it was "a work of inestimable historical importance."
Critic Evelyn C. Leeper suggested that Verne might be a good candidate for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1996, noting that she had not read very many novels that were much better than Verne's work that year. The Hugo award is given annually to honor the best science fiction of the preceding year.
The work is also of importance to scholars of Verne's literary achievements, some of whom had long asserted that none of his works ever came close to prophesying the future of a whole civilization.
Within two years of the novel's appearance, it had been adapted as a stage play in the Netherlands.
Read more about this topic: Paris In The Twentieth Century
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)