Paris 2440/3020: Excavating Daniel Arsham’s Fictional Archaeology

In 1771, the French writer, dramatist, and social commentator Louis-Sébastien Mercier published L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771), an instant bestseller today regarded as one of the earliest science fiction novels. Mercier’s tome traces the journey of a Parisian man of letters after he accidentally wakes up nearly three-quarters of a millennium in the future. Just as George Orwell’s 1984 was a commentary on 1948, Mercier’s novel vaulted eighteenth-century readers into the ostensible year 2440 in order to defamiliarize “their” Paris enough to call into question Ancien Régime policies and institutions. Mercier’s collapse of a linear understanding of time is foreshadowed on the title page of the novel (Fig. 1), which partially excerpts a well-known line by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “The present is pregnant with the future (Le Tems present est gros de l’Avenir).”