In the Year 2889

In the Year 2889 is a short piece of speculative fiction usually attributed to Jules Verne, though scholars have argued for years that the actual author was probably his son Michel Verne, working with notes and ideas from Jules and publishing under his father’s much more famous name. The story first appeared in English in The Forum magazine in 1889, written for an American audience and projecting forward exactly one thousand years to imagine what life in the year 2889 might look like.

The narrative follows Mr. Fritz Napoleon Smith, the editor of the Earth Chronicle, the most powerful newspaper of the future, as he goes through a single working day. The technology Verne or his son imagines is striking. Video calls between continents. Atmospheric advertising projected onto clouds. Air travel as the standard mode of long distance transportation. Synthetic food. Solar power. The transmission of news through some kind of mass broadcast system rather than printed papers. The piece is sometimes credited as one of the earliest works of recognizable science fiction in the modern sense, projecting plausible technological extrapolations rather than fantastical premises.

The story is short, less than ten thousand words, and reads more as a thought experiment than as a fully developed narrative. The plot is thin. The pleasure is in the imaginative inventory of futures, some of which now look prescient and some of which look charmingly off. The atmospheric advertising is here. The video calls are here. The synthetic food is mostly not yet here, though humans have certainly not stopped trying.

For readers interested in early science fiction, in Jules Verne’s wider catalogue, or in the question of what nineteenth century writers thought the distant future would look like, In the Year 2889 is a worthwhile short read. The piece works well alongside Verne’s other speculative fiction like Paris in the Twentieth Century and his more famous adventure novels.