Second paragraph of third chapter (“Beyond Utopia: The Dystopian Capitalist Society in Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863)”, by Murielle El Hajj):
At first sight, the reader thinks that Paris in the Twentieth Century depicts a utopian aspect of the Parisian society in the twentieth century. Verne opens the novel with a portion of the Parisian populace heading to the metro stations from where local trains will take them to Champ-de-Mars. It was August 13, 1960: The Prize Day at the Academic Credit Union. The latter and the age’s industrial aims were “in perfect harmony” (Verne 1996, 21). However, this ideal state of society, where no distress prevails and where no one is unhappy or hopeless seems to be just an illusion. The reader deduces the declination of society, and even its dehumanization, underlining a dystopian world controlled by tyrannical governments and facing environmental disasters.
A collection of ten short essays on futuristic science fiction, a topic which I also enjoy reading and writing about, all rather academic and unfortunately imperfectly edited; the English is clunky in places, and I was startled to read that “Victoria Butler” wrote Parable of the Sower.
But the essays, all written in the shadow of COVID for this 2022 collection, are all decent enough looks at specific works, some of which I know and some of which I don’t:
- French writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1771)
- Argentinian writer Leopoldo Antonio Lugones Argüello’s short stories collected in Las fuerzas extrañas (1906)
- Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century, unpublished until 1994
- Martin Robinson Delany’s African-American freedom novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859-1862)
- Two Russian works of the early Communist era about human-animal hybrids: Alexander Belyaev’s novel The Amphibian Man (1928) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella Heart of a Dog (1925)
- The great French sf writer René Barjavel, especially his 1943 novel Ravage / Ashes, Ashes
- E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909)
- George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945)
- Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888)
- Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel (1940)
For the four essays where I already knew the source material, the authors gave me new insights (the Orwell chapter perhaps the weakest), and all of the other chapters succeeded in making me want to read the works they were about, with Blake and the long-lost Verne sounding the most attractive. I was sorry though that in their analysis of successors and imitators of Edward Bellamy, Majed Al-Lehaibi and Bernard Montonori don’t mention Oesterreich im Jahre 2020!
