The Lost Novel of Jules Verne

After decades of dedicated hoarding, I have an extensive library at home, brilliantly organized in such a way that for any given book, I can probably tell you in which room I have misplaced it, with at least a 50% accuracy.  

I also own a Kindle with sufficient memory to hold thousands of books—a virtual library that I can carry in my coat pocket (an unimaginable luxury just a few decades ago).  Unfortunately, due to Amazon’s somewhat unreasonable and stupid policy, my Kindle is no better organized than my home library.  (C’mon Amazon!  At least allow Kindle owners to organize their book collections into directories!)

Luckily, a great many of the books I need to reference frequently are now in the public domain, meaning that I can download them either for free or at a very low cost.  The works of Herodotus, the collected letters of Abraham Lincoln, and the complete Sherlock Holmes stories can all be downloaded for free.  Recently, I was offered the collected works of Jules Verne for only 99 cents, an offer I happily accepted.    

After I downloaded the books, I spent a couple of hours happily rereading some of my favorite stories, and checking to see if the collection was complete, as was advertised.  Unfortunately, it was missing Jules Verne’s latest novel—the one you have probably never heard of, the lost novel of Jules Verne.

Yes, there is a new novel by Jules Verne.  In 1863, Verne was already extremely popular due to the recent publication of Five Weeks In a Balloon.  When Verne submitted his next manuscript to his publisher, he was shocked to discover that his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, refused to publish it, saying, "I was not expecting perfection — to repeat, I knew that you were attempting the impossible — but I was hoping for something better."

Discouraged, Verne never submitted the manuscript to another publisher and began work on his next novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.  Almost everyone forgot about the manuscript for more than a century, except for a few scholars who discovered the correspondence between Verne and Hetzel, and speculated endlessly on whether the author had destroyed the manuscript.

In 1989, the great-grandson of Verne was disposing of a mountain of collected junk and memorabilia in preparation for selling the rambling four-storied house of the author.  One of the items to be disposed of was a rusty old safe that hadn’t been used in decades.  Since the combination to the safe had long been lost, it took a workman with a blowtorch to open the metal safe.  Inside, the grandson discovered the linen-wrapped manuscript that had been rejected for publication more than a century before.

Finally published in 1994, 131 years after Verne wrote it, Paris in the Twentieth Century was published in France.  Unlike the wide publicity the book received in France, the English translation received little notice in the rest of the world.  In fact, I was unable to find a copy in any nearby library and had to order one.  

In the book, Verne describes life in Paris during August, 1960, some 55 years after the author’s death.   This is a grim dystopian world in which business and technology have completely taken over society, completely eclipsing traditional cultural activities such as the arts and literature.  While more books than ever before are being published, very few Parisians bother to read the current bestsellers, such as “Poetic Parallelogram”, “Meditations on Oxygen”, or “A Practical Treatise for the Lubrication of Driveshafts.”  Verne presents a Paris where the love of painting and sculpture for their own sakes is a discarded ideal of the past that is no longer consistent with the “age’s industrial goals”.

While music is still being produced, it is more of a work of mathematics than an artistic pursuit.  The result is a cacophony of sound and disharmony.  (Here, Verne was a trifle early, as it seems that happened about thirty years after Verne predicted.)

As might be expected from a work by Verne, the author prophetically describes a variety of technological accomplishments long before their actual invention.  The streets are lit with electric lights, people travel in horseless carriages powered by internal combustion engines, driverless pneumatic rails travel underground allowing passengers to disembark and board at Metro stations.  In Verne’s future Paris, the guillotine has been replaced with the electric chair (roughly a quarter of a century before the actual invention) and its use is popularly supported because the method is closest to the “better imitation of divine vengeance”.

Although Verne has the entire world connected by a tight grid of telegraph wires that use fax machines to send photos and documents, he fails to predict telephones or the television.  And strangely, though metal nibs were already used on ink pens in the 1860’s, the people of Paris in the 1960’s use quills to write.  

I really don’t want to give too much of the plot of this book away…just how often in a lifetime are we likely to be able to read a new book by an author who has been dead for 117 years?  Be forewarned, however, that this is not the Jules Verne of Around the World in Eighty Days or 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea, this book is more along the lines of Franz Kafka meets George Orwell, decades before either author were born.  Far from an adventure story, this work is a tragedy that resembles the pessimistic work Verne published later in life, after the death of his editor, Hetzel.

Because of a peculiar loophole in our copyright laws, even though the book is ‘new’, it is already in the public domain because the author has been dead for more than 75 years.  If you would like to read a copy, you will find it here for free.  You can download it, and keep it on your Kindle, like I did.