Jules Verne

Drawing on previously unpublished letters and papers, Herbert R. Lottman reveals Jules Verne, the pioneer of the science fiction genre and the uncannily accurate forecaster of twentieth-century invention, in an entirely new light. In this groundbreaking biography, Lottman explores the dark, private side of the visionary writer. In his long-lost novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century (published in France in 1994, and in the United States in early 1997), Verne predicted a world filled with both technological achievements and monstrosities: cars, fax machines, synthesizers, computers, mass transit, and the electric chair. With uncharacteristic mistrust, Verne simultaneously marveled at the inventions and despaired at what drove people to create them. It is this elusive, disillusioned aspect of Verne that Herbert Lottman captures here. Tracing Verne's life from his childhood in Nantes to his self-imposed exile outside of Paris as an adult, Lottman sketches a vivid portrait of the man. Lottman brings to light for the first time Verne's secret struggles with his constant wanderlust, his unhappy marriage, his rebellious son, and his overbearing editor-publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.