Robida - Le Vingtième siècle - 1884

Robida, Albert. The Twentieth Century.

Illustrations by Robida, including many full-page color plates

Paris, Georges Decaux. 1884. 400 pages. Large octavo. Binding: red half-basane with a smooth spine adorned with quadruple gold fillets and the title. Ex-libris printed. Second flyleaf split. Title page and frontispiece missing.

Second edition. Various wear, notably at the headcaps. Foxing at the beginning of the work.

A major Robida novel that tackles the genre of scientific romance by humorously exploring scientific and technological progress. In this novel, the author describes the daily life of Parisians from 1952 to 1959 and presents numerous inventions such as the telephonoscope or the Tube, which makes the locomotive obsolete.

A classic of speculative fiction foreseeing the telephone, television, the emancipation of women occupying roles as lawyers, war correspondents… Albert Robida, as is known, pushed anticipation far beyond Jules Verne: social, cultural and technical foresight.

"He was the first to show a future in which all technical innovations, however wildly they might have appeared to his contemporaries, are perfectly integrated and used by everyone, natural in one word, in short, a future civilization. Without the scientific knowledge and aids of Verne, relying on his imagination and intuition, he is the only one among nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century forecasters to have presented in advance a picture of our present that is not far from the reality we live today, and which he dated with sufficient precision." Pierre Versins, Encyclopédie de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972).

Rare work, still sought after, by Robida, in which he imagines a futuresome in some respects fanciful but real in others… Title page and frontispiece missing.