Albert Robida

Chalet in the Sky Albert Robida

The father of science fiction illustration, and the author of The Clock of the Centuries and The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, Albert Robida (1848-1926), was the most significant of all of Jules Verne's successors. In A Student in 1950 (1917), Robida returns to his fictional world of 1950 that he introduced in his classic The Twentieth Century (1883) and pens an exciting "Boy's Adventure," featuring the teenage students of the pseudo-futuristic School of Chambourcy, an amusing predecessor to Harry Potter's Hogwarts. In Chalet in the Sky (1925), Robida's last novel and literary "swan song," the author boldly steps forward into the far future when Man has emigrated to other worlds and he depicts the travels of a colorful cast of characters aboard their aerial villa above a bleak and exhausted Earth.