Status Updates From Around the World in Eighty ...

Verne's paradisical world — manic, gleaming with machinery and antiquated technology — is a purely material vision of life. And like all Edens before it, Verneland knows no serious emotions. Consequences, real ones, are a distant memory: we can be sure that things will turn out, because Verne's people are the factory-made gears of a great pocket-watch, and bad things happen to people, not to cogs and gears.

Verne's paradisical world — manic, gleaming with machinery and antiquated technology — is a purely material vision of life. And Verneland, like all Edens before it, knows no serious emotions. Consequences, real ones, are a distant memory: we know that things will turn out, because Verne's people are non-people, gears of a clockwork world, and bad things happen to people, not to cogs and gears.