![]() ![]() ![]() He correctly envisaged cities growing skyward, even if the predicted levitating aerocabs, aerobuses, hot-air balloons, and zeppelins with docking stations on the tops of buildings (Paris’ Central Station atop Notre Dame cathedral) have remained elusive. He predicted the creation of man-made continents reclaimed from the sea (à la Atlantropa, the plans to drain the East and Hudson Rivers in New York and the reclamation of Doggerland by means of a ninety-foot-high Atlantic dam). He envisaged a tunnel under the sea linking France and England. Set in the far-flung 1950s, these are prophetic in terms of the real world and the future of futurology. Far from the merely ornamental, Robida built a vast three-dimensional world in his trilogy The Twentieth Century (1883), War in the Twentieth Century (1887), and The Electric Life (1892). It was a profound critical and appreciative knowledge of the past and present that informed Albert Robida’s visions of a future Paris. In France, the devastating social indictments of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola were joined by images of what could be when-as seemed inevitable to progressives-the rotten present was replaced. It is pantomime fashion and though fun in a tribal sense, it pales in comparison to the actual futurism of the time. We see those who created versions of the future in the early modern age in terms of adornments a steampunk sky scattered with retrofitted airships, Tesla towers, and the ornamental addition of goggles and clockwork mechanisms to already largely fictive Victoriana. ![]()
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