The automobile, the electric chair, even a version of the fax machine. Jules Verne anticipated all of them in a pessimistic 1863 novel about the future, long believed lost and now published for the first time.
The manuscript of "Paris in the 20th Century" was rejected by Verne's own publisher, Jules Hetzel, who found the predictions of a high-tech but soulless society too bleak and farfetched."You've undertaken an impossible task . . . and you haven't brought it off," Hetzel wrote to the 35-year-old author, whose later triumphs - "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" - would make him the best-selling French author of all time.
Verne never revived the rejected manuscript. After his death in 1905, it was placed in a strongbox by his son, Michel, who also mentioned the work in a comprehensive list of all his father's published and unpublished writings.
Michel and his descendants published several of Verne's previously unpublished works, but "Paris in the 20th Century" remained locked in the strongbox, forgotten over the years while scholars began to assume it had been lost or perhaps burned.
In 1989, Verne's great-grandson, Jean, decided to force open the strongbox before selling the family house in Toulon. At first he was unsure what he had found, but by 1991 experts had verified the manuscript's identity.
It was edited into a 218-page book, complete with illustrations by a modern-day Belgian artist, Francois Schuiten, and published this week by Editions Hachette-Le Cherche Midi.
Though Hetzel, in his rejection letter, criticized Verne's abilities as a prophet, the novel shows him to be remarkably prescient in many of his predictions about life in Paris in 1963.
Twenty-five years before cars were invented, he described gasoline-powered automobiles motoring along the capital's boulevards. He writes of an elevated mass-transit system resembling the monorails of today, powered by compressed air and running automatically along tracks. His version of today's fax machine employs a telegraph to send designs by wire over long distances.
And, 25 years before the first electric chair was used in the United States, he describes the electrocution of prisoners at a jail on the outskirts of Paris.