ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.</s>AUDIE CORNISH, Host: When he was young, our commentator Andrei Codrescu used to find a rosy outlook in the writings of a certain French writer and futurist. More recently, he's been finding that outlook doesn't look quite so bright.</s>ANDREI CODRESCU: I might have lived in a cave if you weren't so optimistic about the future, dear Jules, Monsieur Verne. I have no choice now but to download you into my Kindle, more fuel for the bonfires greeting the sci-fi year 2011.</s>AUDIE CORNISH, Host: Commentator Andrei Codrescu says his new book "The Poetry Lesson" is the last book written by a human.
Commentator Andrei Codrescu has been thinking about how the writer Jules Verne shaped his vision of the future. But reading Paris in the 20th Century — written in 1863 and published only in 1994 — he gets a darker vision from Verne, where humans are being replaced by robots. He knows why Verne waited a hundred years to publish this view.