SOUVESTRE (Émile).

♦ Le Monde tel qu'il sera. Paris, Coquebert, n.d. [1846]. In-8, half red chagrined morocco with corners, double gilt fillet, spine ornate, untrimmed, cover and spine (V. Champs). First edition of this conjectural novel set in the year 3000, illustrated with 10 figures outside the text and 80 vignettes in the text, all wood-engraved after Bertall, Penguilly and Saint-Germain, in the first edition. This unique work was enough to ensure its author a prominent place in the history of rational novel conjecture. He is one of the very first anticipators to have tried to foresee the future in all its details, by showing all the bad sides that it will owe to the development of the technique. It is already the great fear of the machine, which we find today in the stories of robots and computers (Versins, Encyclopedia of utopia and science fiction). Slight foxing on a few pages.