Jules Verne's Lost Novel

In 1863, Jules Verne wrote *Paris in the Twentieth Century*, a dystopian novel imagining Paris in 1960 as a cautionary tale about unchecked scientific progress and industrialization—so unlike his typical adventure stories that his publisher rejected it as implausible and bleakly pessimistic. The manuscript remained unpublished for 131 years until it was discovered in a family safe and finally released in France in 1994.