Albert Robida's Electric City Under Siege — La Vie Électrique, 1892

Drawn directly from Albert Robida's visionary novel 'La Vie Électrique' (1892), this pen-and-ink scene depicts a futuristic industrial fortress bristling with towers and antenna-like structures rising from a hillock above a flooded or fog-shrouded cityscape. Energy beams or artillery fire slash across the sky in wild diagonal lines while the foreground city — a dense tangle of domes, spires, and scaffolding — appears under bombardment or catastrophic disruption, showcasing Robida's prescient retro-futurist imagination.