A Floating City, and The Blockade Runners.

Jules Verne’s A Floating City (1871) occupies a distinctive position within his wider body of work, bridging the documentary realism of his early travel narratives and the more speculative tendencies of his later scientific romances. Written during the formative years of the Voyages extraordinaires series, the novel extends Verne’s exploration of modernity’s technological imagination through its depiction of the Great Eastern, a ship that functions as both an engineering marvel and a symbolic microcosm of industrial society. Unlike the overtly exploratory settings of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) or Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), A Floating City confines its action to a closed, man-made environment, transforming the vessel itself into a stage for social observation and psychological inquiry. The text’s attention to the spatial organization of the ship—its hierarchies, routines, and tensions—reveals Verne’s interest in how technology reorganizes human relations and perceptions of space. In this respect, the novel anticipates later works in which Verne interrogates the limits of progress and the ambiguities of modern civilization, marking A Floating City as a crucial transitional text in his engagement with the technological and social conditions of the nineteenth century.