"The Lost Novel" it says on the cover. Abandoned, more like. All authors have manuscripts like these tucked in a desk drawer. They seemed like a good idea at the time, the authors spent time and effort on them, but at the back of their mind they always knew they were duds but couldn't get themselves to the point of binning them.
So what we have here is an early, unbinned work by Jules Verne. The famous big ideas man, the writer of adventure stories set in a near future which the reader could accept and in many ways recognise. Not here. Paris in the Twentieth Century is a social satire with not very big ideas. To be fair, pushed a bit further, the central concept of state-controlled everything could have turned into a breathtaking prophecy about globalisation, albeit without the child slavery aspect.
As it is, Verne made the mistake of setting satire above future-telling. Like all satires it is overdone and over-wordy, full of in-the-know references to long-forgotten figures nobody outside France ever cared about. There is no adventure, just a hapless lad finding out he can't buck the system.
It was a dud when Verne wrote it in 1863. It remains so today. For Verne specialists and collectors of literary curiosities only.
