I read it, and my disappointment was immeasurable, and day ruined. The novel is just bad. It seems the real story is that it was a draft which J.Vernes and his publisher discarded exactly because it was below expected quality line, and not because "prophecy implausible". Fast forward to our times, and someone decided (not without a reason) that it's possible to sell anything with J.Vernes name on it, and marketed it as a "lost manuscript" accidentally found in "family safe".
Yes, coincidence. It was submitted for publication but rejected in 1863 (and then lost in a pile of papers and re-found in 1989). Anybody familiar with e.g. how most of Tolkien’s works were published posthumously won’t be surprised. Jules Verne wrote a lot, and he did not have a Christopher to comb through the boxes of papers he left. There are 200k pages of drafts, letters and manuscripts in a museum in Nantes, and not everything ended up there.
And I don’t see why the Internet is relevant: not everything that happened since the mid-1980s are internet-related conspiracies.
It would have been more interesting if it had been published in 1991 so as to directly invite comparison to David Brin's _Earth_ in which that author did much the same (imagine life in the future), or not until 2012 so as to be contrasted with KSR's _2312_.
Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).
The nice thing is that once it’s been published, you can re-read it at any time, and then compare it with whatever book you want. I don’t see how the publication year is really relevant, books don’t just expire after 6 months.
It should at least have been a woodcut of the AI skyline, just like those in those blue books. We had more or less a full set of those, printed in the late 1800s/early 1900s which I voraciously read as a child. Reading 'The Children of Captain Grant' and seeing those images of Tierra del Fuego or the jungle or any of the other scenes really brought the 'pathos' of the stories alive, as if I were a Victorian setting out to see the wonders of the world. They still do for me, probably 'cause of my early experience with those books.
I am not sure I belive the story about thr manuscript however. It surfaced just as the Internet was becoming a thing. Coincidence?
And I don’t see why the Internet is relevant: not everything that happened since the mid-1980s are internet-related conspiracies.
Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).
https://janbecke.com/portfolio-item/paris/
Take from that what you will.
Here's a site - ignore the warnings about the certificate - showing some of these images: https://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/illustr/