History Literature / ParisInTheTwentiethCentury

** AuthorFilibuster ...but deserving of special mention is the chapter dedicated to describing how the composer Wagner and his "cult" of imitators with their harsh angsty new sound were clearly going to [[RuinedFOREVER ruin music FOREVER]]. ([[Music/{{Skrillex}} Sound]] [[{{Dubstep}} familiar]]?)

* CorruptCorporateExecutive / MegaCorp: In the 20th century, they run the world. Yet another accurate prediction!

* {{Dystopia}}

* NoNewFashionsInTheFuture: Somewhat subverted - particularly nicely when the characters decry the far more utilitarian clothing of modern French women - but most fashions still seem to be based on 19th century clothing and its principles.

** AuthorFilibuster ...but deserving of special mention is the chapter dedicated to describing how the composer Wagner and his "cult" of imitators with their harsh angsty new sound were clearly going to [[RuinedFOREVER ruin music FOREVER]]. ([[{{Creator/Skrillex}} Sound]] [[{{Dubstep}} familiar]]?)

* TheAlternet: Likely UrExample, as the book made a prediction of networked calculating machines, "picture-telegraphs", and other forms of instant long-range communications.

* ADegreeInUseless: Scathingly {{deconstruct|ion}}s the attitudes that produce this trope. A society without creativity and the arts is an emotionally dead world.

* ADegreeInUseless: Scathingly {{deconstruct|ion}}s the attitudes that produce this trope.

** the rise of both fluff pop music and an artsy underground- what his professors encourage him to embrace, rather than high art, and where he finds acceptance of his most artistic works
** the PunkRock and HeavyMetal genres- perfectly mirrored in the cacophonous music gleefully embraced by the composer as a way to satisfy both his artistic urges and appeal to public tastes, as well as his demeanor. The angst-driven [[CrossesTheLineTwice "you haven't heard anything yet..."]] competition among himself and his fellow disillusioned composers in trying to make the most bizarre and grating music possible to lampoon the proscribed "rules" of music, hits disturbingly close to the exact definition of the {{Industrial}} music movement.
** the fall of the live classical symphonic performance as the primary source of music and the rise of the recorded music industry- This particular composer finds his own liberation in the form of an electronic device equivalent to a modern synthesizer. He no longer needs a skilled orchestra or concert hall to profit from his work; he simply composes a piece and the machine will play compositions impossible for a human orchestra to perform perfectly every time. The fact that this is both decried as taking the artistry and tradition out of the performance side of music, and celebrated as freeing the composer to explore entirely new musical territory only adds to the accuracy.

** the rise of the underground ElectronicMusic scene out of frustrated individuals who would have once likely have become classical symphonic composers, combining entirely novel sounds and complexity that no orchestra could ever reproduce, with the best aspects of their modern music and traditional composition to create something entirely new and beautiful.

* AuthorTract: the work as a whole was clearly Verne raging against the industrial era assimilating his beloved pre-"City of Lights" Paris

* BlackSheep: Michel is considered useless by his whole family. To make matters worse, his family is one of the most powerfull in all Paris.

* CyberpunkWithAChanceOfRain: set in slushy deep winter in a sprawling (then) futuristic CityNoir version of 1960's Paris.

* ExtrudedBookProduct: The theatre has descended to this level, with teams of writers each specializing in some small aspect of writing. Good action and sex scene writers are highly prized.
* FutureMusic: The music pieces have names relating to technology ("Thiloriade, Great Fantasia About Condensation Of Carbonic Acid") and sound like unrhythmic, jubled mess of noises.

* RomanticismVersusEnlightenment: a core theme of the book, and very much gunning on the side of Romanticism.
* ScienceIsBad: see "Ludd Was Right" above.

* TrueArtIsAncient: [[invoked]] Invoked in-universe. The major characters are contemptuous at best of everything produced int he last century, whether literary, musical, or visual.
* {{Zeerust}} / TechMarchesOn: Though calculating machines take the place of computers, records are still kept in books. In this case, a colossal book apparently four meters tall, whose pages are turned with machinery. Also, fashions and and some aspects of daily life are still very reminescent of the 19th century and there is apparently no air transport (except the odd airship or two, probably). The clothing is also made of spun metal, the closest approach Verne could make to synthetic fibers before the development of polymers.

As an initially unpublished (and largely unedited) work, the novel is closer to Verne's post-ProtectionFromEditors style than the writings most readers will be familiar with, [[SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism particularly]] [[HumansAreBastards in regards]] [[LuddWasRight to its cynicism]]. Verne imagines the Paris of 1960 as a bleak dystopia where art and creativity are stifled, and cold-hearted pragmatism, [[StrawVulcan logic]], commerce, and industrial development are the only things that anyone cares about. Michel Dufrénoy, the protagonist, is one of the last students of the humanities graduating from his university, a cause for shame for his family, and endless misery and failure for him throughout the story as he struggles to survive alone in a cold, mechanized world without losing his identity. (Today in the real world, people would likely tell him to prepare for a lifetime of serving fries...) The depressing tone and message of the novel is the ''other'', and likely bigger, reason why it was initially denied publication and remained forgotten for so long.

* {{Cyberpunk}}: In a sense this novel technically could be considered the UrExample of cyberpunk; an {{angst}}y young punk struggles against what he sees as a soul-destroying ViceCity in a CrapsackWorld, and its LuddWasRight attitude mirrors the future genera perfectly

** the rise of the underground ElectronicMusic scene out of frustrated individuals who would have once likely have become classical symphonic composers, combining entirely novel sounds and complexity that no orchestra could ever reproduce with the best aspects of their intentionally grating but oddly likable music and traditional composition to create something entirely new and beautiful.

While a good read, the novel isn't Verne's best. What makes it ''very'' interesting, however, is the accuracy of its many predictions about the future. Verne wrote the novel in 1863, and it is set in the [[TheFuture far-off futuristic world]] of ''1960''. Verne did a remarkably good job of predicting the world one hundred years in his future. Amusingly, one of the reasons his novel was not published for so long is that publishers originally felt his predictions to be too unrealistic.

As an initially unpublished work, the novel is closer to Verne's post-ProtectionFromEditors style than the writings most readers will be familiar with, [[SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism particularly]] [[HumansAreBastards in regards]] [[LuddWasRight to its cynicism]]. Verne imagines the Paris of 1960 as a bleak dystopia where art and creativity are stifled, and cold-hearted pragmatism, [[StrawVulcan logic]], commerce, and industrial development are the only things that anyone cares about. Michel Dufrénoy, the protagonist, is one of the last students of the humanities graduating from his university, a cause for shame for his family, and endless misery and failure for him throughout the story as he struggles to survive alone in a cold, mechanized world without losing his identity. (Today in the real world, people would likely tell him to prepare for a lifetime of serving fries...) The depressing tone and message of the novel is the ''other'', and likely bigger, reason why it was initially denied publication and remained forgotten for so long.
----
!!Notable predictions of ''Paris in the Twentieth Century'':

* Modern Music: In using music as a representation of art as a whole, Verne foreshadows in essence the entire history of music in the 20th century.
* He predicts or explores:

** the rise of both fluff pop music and an artsy underground- what his proffesors encourage him to embrace, rather than high art, and where he finds acceptance of his most artistic works
** the PunkRock and HeavyMetal generas- perfectly mirrored in the cacaphonous music gleefully embraced by the composer as a way to satisfy both his artistic urges and appeal to public tastes, as well as his demeanor. The angst-driven [[CrossesTheLineTwice "you haven't heard anything yet..."]] competition among himself and his fellow disillusioned composers in trying to make the most bizarre and grating music possible to lampoon the proscribed "rules" of music, hits disturbingly close to the exact definition of the {{Industrial}} music movement.
** the fall of the live classical symphonic performance as the primary source of music and the rise of the recorded music industry- This particular composer finds his own liberation in the form of a device whose description sounds a lot like a synthesizer; he no longer needs a skilled orchestra or concert hall to profit from his work, he simply composes a piece and the machine will play it note-for-note perfectly every time. The fact that this is both decried as taking the artistry and tradition out of music and celebrated as freeing the composer to explore entirely new musical territory only adds to the accuracy.
** numerous future musical movements and generas: The composer and his fellows have also begun experimenting with combining the best aspects of their raucous new music and traditional composition to create something more than either alone, and with using the electronic device to create music incorporating entirely novel sounds that no orchestra could ever produce, . While these attempts at reinventing the musical world are rejected by the old guard and the critics as sentimental, lacking in artistic or creative merit, or worthless for lack of mass appeal, they form an underground movement creating complex and beautiful music in defiance of the proscribed popular styles and the old guards doctrine of music. Experimental movements like Jazz and [[NewWaveMusic New Wave]], the dominance of popular hit-of-the-week movements like Ragtime and PopMusic, artsy and emotional movements like AlternativeRock and {{Blues}}, and the even the rise of the underground ElectronicMusic scene out of frustrated individuals who would have once likely have become classical symphonic composers.

* ExtrudedBookProduct: The theatre has descended to this level, with teams of writers each specializing in some small aspect of writing.

* SteamPunk: Arguably... ''averted''. Verne - [[ShownTheirWork as was typical for him]] - foresaw that steam would ''not'' be the main source of power in 1960. He bet on compressed air, instead.
** CyberPunk: On the note of PunkPunk, some readers did notice some eerie similarities between the themes of this story and that genre. Either that, or it's an UnbuiltTrope SteamPunk {{Dystopia}}.

* TrueArtIsAncient: The major characters are contemtuous at best of everything produced int he last century, whether literary, musical, or visual.

* OldShame: 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''. Also, the novel is kind of an OddOneOut compared to the rest of his early writings : Thematically, it's far more evocative of his later novels (cca from the 1880s onward), which were more pesimistic about the effects of technological advancement on humanity and had more HumansAreBastards 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 CreatorBreakdown in the 1870s and 1880s, which lead to his works becoming far DarkerAndEdgier. It's as if this novel was teleported from that later phase of his writing carreer, instead of the more cheerful early one.

** numerous future musical movements and generas: The composer and his fellows have also begun experimenting with combining the best aspects of their raucous new music and traditional composition to create something more than either alone, and with using the electronic device to create music incorporating entirely novel sounds that no orchestra could ever produce, . While these attempts at reinventing the musical world are rejected by the old guard and the critics as sentimental, lacking in artistic or creative merit, or worthless for lack of mass appeal, they form an underground movement creating complex and beautiful music in defiance of the proscribed popular styles and the old guards doctrine of music. Experimental movements like Jazz and NewWave, the dominance of popular hit-of-the-week movements like Ragtime and PopMusic, artsy and emotional movements like AlternativeRock and {{Blues}}, and the even the rise of the underground ElectronicMusic scene out of frustrated individuals who would have once likely have become classical symphonic composers.

* {{Zeerust}} / TechMarchesOn: Though calculating machines take the place of computers, records are still kept in books. In this case, a colossal book apparently four meters tall, whose pages are turned with machinery. Also, fashions and and some aspects of daily life are still very reminescent of the 19th century and there is apparently no air transport (except the odd airship or two, probably).

* Modern Music: In using music as a representation of art as a whole, Verne foreshadows in essence the entire history of music in the 20th century.
He predicts or explores:

* ADegreeInUseless: Scathingly {{deconstruct|ion}}s the attitudes that produce this trope.

* Automobiles: About twenty years before the modern car[[note]]Automobiles had been around since 1769, but they were basically experiments[[/note]] in its most rudimentary form was invented, Verne predicted not only the widespread use of cars, but also infrastructures built around them. His Paris of 1960 was filled with automobiles powered by compressed air (cars that run on compressed air actually exist today, though they aren't very efficient). "Refuelling" stations for compressed air were placed around the city, and the [[MegaCorp monopolistic company]] supplying the compression was very rich, powerful, and morally dubious. Make of that what you will.

* Automobiles: About twenty years before the modern car[[hottip:*:Automobiles had been around since 1769, but they were basically experiments]] in its most rudimentary form was invented, Verne predicted not only the widespread use of cars, but also infrastructures built around them. His Paris of 1960 was filled with automobiles powered by compressed air (cars that run on compressed air actually exist today, though they aren't very efficient). "Refuelling" stations for compressed air were placed around the city, and the [[MegaCorp monopolistic company]] supplying the compression was very rich, powerful, and morally dubious. Make of that what you will.

* RomanticismVersusEnlightenment: the core theme of the book, and very much gunning on the side of Romanticism.

* CorruptCorporateExecutive / MegaCorp: In the 20th century, they run the world. Yet another accurate prediction!

* NoNewFashionsInTheFuture: Somewhat subverted - particularly nicely when the characters decry the far more utilitarian clothing of modern French women - but most fashions still seem to be based on 19. century clothing and its principles.

* OldShame: 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''. Also, the novel is kind of an OddOneOut compared to the rest of his early writings : Thematically, it's far more evocative of his later novels (cca from the 1880s onward), which were more pesimistic about the effects of technological advancement on humanity and had more HumansAreBastards 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 CreatorBreakdown in the 1870s and 1880s, which lead to his works becoming far DarkerAndEdgier. It's as if this novel was teleported from that later phase of his writing carreer, instead of the more cheerful early one.* ScienceIsBad: And how.

!!Notable predictions of ''ParisInTheTwentiethCentury'':

!!Tropes found in ''ParisInTheTwentiethCentury'':