Jules Verne has been ‘saved’. From the late fifties a steady stream of approbatory reviews, articles and books penned by intellectual luminaries such as Roland Barthes, William Golding and Michel Serres, and other notable figures like Simone Vierne and Jean-Yves Tadié, has secured for the most translated of all French writers the literary recognition he had craved during his lifetime but thought beyond reach. Ironically, this posthumous good reception has since rebounded on the author whose name has attracted a certain controversy in the wake of the new complexities found in his work. In September 1994 the publication by Hachette of what was previously a Verne inédit, entitled Paris au XXe siècle, further stoked what was already a hot debate.

The belated interest in Verne is not especially concerned with the assessment of his literary qualities. As all literature today seems appreciated more for the way in which it defines the prevailing culture than for its intrinsic literariness, so, in relation to Jules Verne, other not strictly literary issues are now at stake: the political and cultural identity of the man; the authenticity of his writings; his status as a national emblem or myth; and above all the diagnostic witness of his vast and original oeuvre to the societies past and present in which it was manufactured and is now read. The resurgence of Jules Verne as a leading light in French literature is also inextricably linked with the emergence of science fiction over the past forty years from cultish sideshow into the mainstream of literary consciousness, a sign of recognition that the collapsing of science into fiction is, in its essential ambiguity, the biggest and most challenging affirmation of the value of literature to the modern world. Perhaps it is by virtue of the questions that now cloud the pristine images of his child-oriented adventure stories that Verne is a little less distanced from this hybrid genre he was supposed to have helped found than he once was. Paris au XXe siècle is heralded as an uncannily precise representation of the French capital in 1961, roughly one hundred years on from its time of composition.