JF Ptak Science Books Post 1590
Albert Robida (1848-1926) saw pretty deeply into the future, his mind wrapped around the plausibilities of possibilities, and getting a lot of them quite right. He was enormously prolific, with some 60,000 designs to his credit as well as 200 illustrated books and many dozens of illustrated journals, many of them quite lovely and prescient, if somewhat upsetting to the common-reading mind of mid-late 19th Europe.
Robida1 shared several decades of peak-creativity time with the stone-cold master of the as-yet defined science fiction realms in the person of Jules Verne (1828-1905), who certainly wrote deeper and longer than Robida, though without Robida’s creative artistic talents. But the 1870’s and 1880’s would have been prime space for both men, even though Verne’s2 best years were behind him and he had entered a decidedly darker period by that point–that said, the men did share the same oxygens of Europe, separated by just hundreds of miles.
It might be said that Verne had somewhat loftier visions of the future than Robida; perhaps not., Robida does seems to have a great (and perhaps more) concern with the future of the more middle-class/vast mass of people, and again, perhaps not. One thing is for certain, to me at least–Robida does deserve much more attention than he presently receives, though perhaps that will come more in the future that he created.
“La sortie de l’Opéra en l’an 2000”. Original source: Bibliodyssey
“Un quartier embrouillé “, La Vie électrique, Paris, Librairie Illustrée, [1892].