TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the book “Paris in the Twentieth Century” written by Jules Verne has been released in the bookstores across Iran.

Translated by Mehdi Behnoush, the book has been brought out by Qoqnoos Publishing House, ILNA reported.

The 64th and final novel by Jules Verne, the book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne's future, when society places value only on business and technology.

Written in 1860, but first published in 1994, the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced but culturally backward world. The work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological civilization.

Many of Verne's predictions are remarkably on target. However, his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, did not accept the book because he thought that it was too unbelievable and that its sales prospects would be inferior to those of Verne's previous work, “Five Weeks in a Balloon”.

As an initially unpublished (and largely unedited) work, the novel is closer to Verne's post-Protection from Editors style than the writings most readers will be familiar with, particularly in regard to its cynicism. Verne imagines the Paris of 1960 as a bleak dystopia where art and creativity are stifled, and cold-hearted pragmatism, logic, commerce, and industrial development are the only things that anyone cares about. This attitude probably stems from Verne's early job as a stockbroker, which he hated from the bottom of his heart, and which caused his lifelong contempt of Corrupt Corporate Executives and their worldview.

Michel Dufrénoy, the protagonist, is one of the last students of the humanities graduating from his university, a cause for shame for his family, and endless misery and failure for him throughout the story as he struggles to survive alone in a cold, mechanized world without losing his identity. The depressing tone and message of the novel is the other, and likely bigger, reason why it was initially denied publication and remained forgotten for so long — a first sign of Hetzel's lifelong editorial pressure, as he felt them too ingrained in the novel to be edited out, and canned it indefinitely.

Jules Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the “Voyages extraordinaires,” a series of bestselling adventure novels including “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1864), “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” (1870), and “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1872). His novels are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account contemporary scientific knowledge and the technological advances of the time.

In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games.

Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.

Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the “father of science fiction,” a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world.

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