Science and moneymaking rule, the arts are despised and Victor Hugo is forgotten. The chief interest for us now is in what Verne gets right and what he gets wrong about the century we are poised to discard. This is superficially impressive, yet local to the world of science and technology that fascinated Verne. When he tries for anything broader, he is hopelessly, ridiculously wrong. More seriously, Verne proposes a France in which the practices of medicine and the law have died out, since people no longer get ill or disputatious.
War is ''no longer possible'' because armies have long since been disbanded across Europe.
He expressed this pacific forecast seven years before the Franco-Prussian War. When it comes to the personal life, Verne is less obviously at sea because rethinking human, as opposed to scientific, matter is largely beyond him. If ''Paris in the Twentieth Century'' is atypical of Verne's output, it is still helpful in pointing up why he is and isn't read nowadays. There remains, of course, a surviving literary tradition in which boys have adventures and celebrate their toys, and their readership still reveres Verne. But all toys date quickly.