The setting is Paris; the year, 1960. People get around in amazing contraptions controlled by steering wheels and gas pedals. “An invisible force with a gas-powered motor made them move,” Verne writes 26 years before the appearance of the first combustion-engined car. A “photographic telegraph permitted the dispatch over long distances of the facsimile of any writing, signature or design,” Verne explains more than 100 years before fax machines were perfected. And 25 years ahead of the electric chair, Verne wrote, “People were no longer behing beheaded. They were being electrocuted.” The author of “20,000 Leagues Under the SEa” and “Around the World in 80 Days” had a Nostradamus-like nose for prediction. But like George Orwell’s “1984,” Verne’s “Paris” is a bleak prophecy. His hero is a homeless poet alienated into starvation and misery by this brave new world. Everyone around him is miserable: “One felt the demon of money was driving them without … mercy.” Laughter is punishable by death, although there’s no mention of Jerry Lewis becoming a French cultural icon. Not even Jules Verne could have predicted that.
