Robida - Le Vingtième siècle - 1884

The Twentieth Century.
Illustrations by Robida.
Paris, Georges Decaux. 1884. 404 pages. Large octavo. Publisher's binding elaborately decorated in green percaline, with the design carried over onto the boards and the spine. Engraved binder and Souze plate. Gilded edges. Original endpapers.
Second edition, rare in publisher's binding with a somewhat duller percaline, which is often the case with this color and on this volume. Various scuffs and a small repair at the level of the spine and the corner of the first board. Some usual looseness of gatherings. Complete with the 50 plates hors-texte, some in color.

Major Robida novel that approaches the genre of the marvelous science, humorously addressing 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 posts as lawyers, war correspondents… Albert Robida, as is known, pushed anticipation much further than Jules Verne: social, cultural, and technical foresight.

"He was the first to show a future in which all technical innovations, however crazy they may have seemed to his contemporaries, are perfectly integrated and used by everyone—natural, in a word—a future civilization. Without Verne's scientific knowledge and aids, relying on his fancy and intuition, he is the only one among all the forecasters of the 19th century and the early 20th century to have presented in advance a picture of our present that is not too far from the reality we live today, and he dated it with enough precision." — Pierre Versins, Encyclopédie de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972).

A entirely acceptable copy despite some minor signs of use, which remains rare, especially in a publisher's binding…