Scientific curiosity meets ambition and unsettling consequences
Vintage Fair Condition - Decorated cloth covers faded, rubbed and soiled, with frayed corners and torn spine ends. Front hinge split with exposed mesh. Page edges darkened, endpapers spotted and stained, pages marked. Published 1888.
Two imaginative tales reveal Jules Verne’s interest in the unsettling possibilities that arise when human ambition outruns judgement. In Dr Ox’s Experiment, a scientist introduces a remarkable innovation to a placid Flemish town, and its formerly unhurried citizens begin to behave in startlingly unfamiliar ways. Their altered tempers and growing excitability turn the experiment into a satire of progress and collective behaviour. Master Zacharius moves into darker territory, following a proud clockmaker whose failing timepieces become bound up with his own sense of mastery and identity. Combining fantastic invention with questions about pride, control and responsibility, the stories offer a different side of Verne from his best-known adventure novels. Period illustrations add to the atmosphere of these compact explorations of science and human weakness.
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