e should start with the facts. Albert Robida (1848-1926) was a French illustrator and writer, much better known in the former capacity than the latter. Before now, a few of his nonfiction books had been translated into English, but that was a long time ago; most of us, on the other hand, have seen some of his illustrations—over a 50-year career, he published more than 60,000 of them in magazines and books by a wide range of authors—though we may not have known who had executed them.
As a visual artist, he clearly shows the influence of the two 19th-century French illustrators we are most likely still to remember, Honoré Daumier (1808-1979) and Gustave Doré (1832-1883), though (to use a musical analogy) he is a kind of Offenbach to their Gounod/Meyerbeer: swift, cartoonlike, perfect-pitch, parodic, feverish, exuberant, pantomimish, droll. Robida is, in fact, a far cry from his predecessors; his visions of the new France prefigure a changed world, a world exfoliated (more or less literally) out of the gears of Technic. The scenes he depicts stretch—leap—from the here and now into a surreal invention-shaped chock-full aether.
If we are to think of whom he resembles as a visual artist, we should think, perhaps, of W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944), who illustrated some of the same authors as Robida (both took on Rabelais, for example), and whose satirical exaggerations (as in Some "Frightful" War Pictures, 1915, which clearly echoes some of Robida's books about Future Wars) similarly reflect an almost goofy kindness of heart about the human condition; both artists normally eschew any personal savagery about their human targets, who are made fun of but never demeaned in their attempts to ride the tsunamis of transformation; and both render the artifacts of their invented worlds in terms that make them seem as animate as the humans who intersect with them.
But Robida was also an SF writer of very considerable importance, and we need to be grateful to The Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction Series (edited by the extremely savvy Arthur B. Evans) for giving Philippe Willems the chance to present (as both translator and introducer) this absolutely superb edition of Robida's second SF novel, Le Vingtième Siècle (1882). His first, Voyages trés extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul [The Most Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul] (1879), is a spoof of and homage to his elder contemporary Jules Verne, who (as Willems argues in his slightly academical but intensely informed introduction) should not perhaps be considered as primarily an SF writer at all. Little of Verne's work is set in the future; most of it extrapolates horizontally—as it were, geographically—from already existing technologies; much of it, in other words, as most scholars now grant, is not SF at all. Robida is a different fish altogether. He is a pure SF fish.
A future alive with electricity
It is certainly possible to approach The Twentieth Century as a kind of narratized utopia, which doesn't make it sound very appetizing. The plot is minimal—young Hélène, ward of the billionaire financier Ponto, flounces insufferably through a number of occupations she is too "feminine" to tolerate, giving us a cook's tour of the world of 1952 as she does, and acquiring a husband in time to leave the last pages of the book entirely alone—and everyone in the large cast is quite astonishingly excited about the marvels of that world, and exceedingly eager to answer naive questions about the new order of things. This sense that the world one inhabits is an exposition to be unveiled, an arcade in which the marvels of one's life and world can effectively be put on sale, is not only typical of most utopias, where it serves an obvious didactic function; it also confirms any analysis of late 19th-century culture in France as perhaps uniquely self-conscious in its understanding of individual lives and the cities individual humans fill to overflowing: Lives and cities are dramas to be consumed.
The France of this era is an epic of mirrors and advertisements, of a grasping at futurity. [For anyone who wants to examine more deeply how the condition of France, rather than Britain or the United States, might be thought of as prophetic of our present state, two books in particular come to mind: Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (written before 1940; 1999) and Philippe Hamon's Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France (1989).] And Robida is the poet of all this. The world of The Twentieth Century is as supersaturated with ads and product placements as the world of 2004; it is not so much a utopia as it is a world fair made storyable.
In the 1870s, when much of the book was clearly drafted, or at least envisioned, Robida was a lot luckier than he could have guessed, certainly if he wanted to seem prophetic. Skyscrapers did not yet exist (the first building with an internal supporting skeleton was years away), and so the infinitely degradable innovations of architectural modernism could not paralyze his sense of the shape of things to come with the kind of Futurama Frigidairism mocked so viciously in the superb title credits to the remake of The Stepford Wives (2004); there were no cars, which meant no deafening horizontal gigantism; airplanes were still a mocked dream, but dirigibles were not. So the world he was able to envision, in innumerable drawings and in the text of this hilarious, moving novel, somehow leapfrogs over most of the 20th century.
It is an atrium world, an aquarium world in which dirigibles of all sorts—Robida typically draws them with fish bodies and fish faces—rise and fall like bubbles. Some dirigibles are used solely for transport (there are no cars in Paris), and cluster like bees around points of interest, hotels, restaurants, transit stations, government office, edifices of every sort uplifted like flowers into the crowded skies. Other, more massive dirigibles are used to support the skyward reaches of these aviary edifices, which, like bubbles of earth, extend their element upwards. There is nothing of the 20th century in this, nothing of what its architectural fantastists hoped for. There is a lot of what we dream of now.
Robida was also lucky to take mental flight in the 1870s, because he was able to o'erleap the 20th century in yet another way: for the motive power for his new world is not internal combustion but simple, pure, magical electricity, which courses through everything. And although Robida had a deficient sense of the power of electricity to convey information (he makes little use of the real-time implications of telephone technology), he knew in his bones that information would have to be conveyed. His telephonoscope, which conveys sight and sound simultaneously, and which works at times very much like e-mail (including infestations of spam), provides a very neat demonstration of a sense that futurity (as with William Gibson) is very much better expressed by those with intuitions about how the future might feel than it is by those (like Jules Verne, or Hugo Gernsback) who focus on how the future could work. So what that the telephonoscope is run through a mumbo-jumbo application of electrical principles; it's what we look through now, it's what speaks to us here.
Yesterday's dream of today
The humans who inhabit this performative world are themselves, of course, performers. When The Twentieth Century leaves Paris, its protagonists find themselves mixing with natives of other societies who look and act exactly like Parisians: In a world as rich in information as Robida's, culture becomes style. As the woebegone Hélène drifts from profession to profession—from the law to government and finally to the press—she finds herself attempting to learn how to live as an actor on an urban stage. It is not what she utters, but when in the course of the play she opens her mouth. That she never learns, and that she is a throwback in other ways to the helpless female of 19th-century popular fiction, does sometimes interfere with Robida's exhilarated (though at times sharply satiric) take on the foliage and aeration of the world to come. Nor is the modified emancipation of women he seems to take more or less for granted much honored in her abject stumbling into docile employment as the wife of a dominant male.
Fortunately, she becomes less and less prominent as the scope of the book widens. We learn that the United States has been balkanized since 1910, the eastern portion under German dominance, the western under Chinese, and the middle under Mormon rule. During the course of the novel, Ponto successfully transforms Italy into a theme park. Most former Italians have been sent to South America; The quarter that remain act out being Italian for tourists. Everyone is happy. In the last pages of The Twentieth Century, Ponto's son (élè's husband) creates a sixth continent in the South Pacific; overpopulation is no longer a problem. And so forth.
But these larger political japes are not the heart of the thing. The heart of The Twentieth Century is the dream of Paris afloat in its bath of electricity in the night. The heart of the book is the dream of flight.
