6 h 36 minAudiobook5 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if every machine that makes life easier also brings a new nuisance?
In The Twentieth Century: The Electric Life, Albert Robida imagines a society where electricity powers daily life. Flying vehicles fill the skies, devices crowd the streets, and invention seems to reach everywhere. This future dazzles, but it also wears people down. The question is not simply what technology can do, but what living with it feels like.
First published in 1892, this science fiction satire looks ahead to the middle of the twentieth century. Robida explores his imagined society through crowded pictures and dry jokes. He delights in invention without ignoring its irritations. Rather than a tightly plotted adventure, the book offers a busy view of a world where progress keeps bringing fresh complications.
What you’ll discover
- Electricity at the center Explore an imagined society where one force shapes the rhythms of everyday life.
- Skies crowded with invention Look up at flying vehicles, then down at streets packed with devices.
- The nuisance of progress Enjoy the dry humor of a future whose conveniences bring their own troubles.
- A satirist's crowded world Discover pictures full of machines, crowds, and the bustle of an electric society.
- Delight with a sting Follow Robida's pleasure in invention alongside his sharp sense of its costs.
Who will love it
For readers who love early science fiction, the history of technology and satirical drawings, with dry jokes about a society powered by electricity.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Electricity becomes the air everyone breathes
- Distance shrinks and the screen takes over
- Cities, skies and crowds full of machines
- Progress has a price, and the future answers back
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Il ventesimo secolo: la vita elettrica
by Albert Robida · 1892
In Robida's electric future, screens conquer distance and skies fill with machines, but every invention has a price.
Challenging5–10 hours to read25 languages
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Electricity becomes the air everyone breathes
The first book in the pair imagined a world of new machines. The sequel puts one force at the center of daily life, and the force is electricity. Robida treats it less as a single invention and more as a condition of modern living. Homes, streets, work and leisure all depend on it.
His claim is simple. A society does not adopt a technology and stay the same. It reorganizes itself around it. People change their habits, their jobs and their sense of what is normal, and then they cannot imagine life without it.
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What is The Twentieth Century: The Electric Life about?
It is a satirical novel in which Robida imagines a society in the middle of the twentieth century that runs on electricity. It shows the wonders of new machines and the troubles they bring.
Is La Vie électrique a sequel?
Yes. It follows Robida's earlier Le Vingtième Siècle and continues his picture of a future shaped by technology. Both books are illustrated by the author, and the sequel gives special attention to electricity.
When was The Electric Life written?
It was published in 1892 in France. Robida was writing in the late nineteenth century and imagining life about sixty years ahead, so the book shows how people of his time pictured the future.
The author
Albert Robida
1848–1926 · French illustrator and novelist
Albert Robida was a French illustrator and writer born in Compiègne in 1848. He worked in Paris and wrote and illustrated books as well as contributing drawings to periodicals. His novels include The Twentieth Century (1883) and The Twentieth Century: The Electric Life (1890). He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1926.
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