Something very strange is in the air of the harmonious town of Quiquendone. Unknown to its inhabitants, the mad genius Dr. Ox has unleashed a veil of oxyhydric gas over the town--his own living laboratory--in an attempt to spice things up. In his amusing portrait of an idyllic community suddenly overtaken by an appetite for aggression, Jules Verne points to the ease with which any society--and the modern resonance is unmissable--can be manipulated by its masters into hatred and war. Jules Verne was the originator of modern science fiction; among his works are Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Something very strange is in the air of the harmonious town of Quiquendone.The sleepy pace of life-in which municipal decisions are infinitely deferred and the average heartbeat rarely exceeds fifty beats per minute is starting to accelerate. Tempers flare and passions rise in Verne's brilliantly witty satire, while fi'iends fall out,marriages are contracted in haste, and the entire community declares war on the neighbouring town over a threehundred-year-old dispute involving a cow. Just who is the strange and shadowy doctor whose arrival seems bound up with these extraordinary developments?

The mysterious Dr Ox watches his subjects' increasingly bizarre behaviour with the detached eye of the vivisectionist, a sinisterly manipulative figure who simultaneously echoes the great hubristic heroes of nineteenth-century horror fantasy, and foreshadows the ideological spectres of the twentieth century. Full of hilarious set pieces, as the tempo of life and art in Quiquendone inexplicably speeds up,A Fantasy of Dr Ox is a fable whose resonance reaches far beyond its milieu.

Foreword by Gilbert Adair

Introduction

A Fantasy of Dr Ox

Notes

Biographical note