Trivia / Paris in the Twentieth Century

• Creator Backlash: While Verne actually liked the novel and defended it, his first real publisher, Hetzel, was fond of criticizing it. Verne later gave up and the novel became forgotten and unpublished until freaking 1994.
• Creator's Oddball: Thematically, it's far more evocative of Verne's later novels (cca from the 1880s onward), which were more pessimistic about the effects of technological advancement on humanity and had more Humans Are Bastards undertones. Mind you, Paris was only his second sci-fi or adventure novel, and he went on to write many exciting and genuinely optimistic novels until he suffered a gradual Creator Breakdown in the 1870s and 1880s, which lead to his works becoming far Darker and Edgier. It's as if this novel was teleported from that later phase of his writing career, instead of the more cheerful early one.