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The Coming Race
by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
Tim Pendry's review
bookshelves: british, black-comedy, dark-fantasy, cultural-studies, esoteric, literature-general, nineteenth-century, political-philosophy, religion-spiritual, science-fiction, sexuality-erotica
May 05, 12
bookshelves: british, black-comedy, dark-fantasy, cultural-studies, esoteric, literature-general, nineteenth-century, political-philosophy, religion-spiritual, science-fiction, sexuality-erotica
This is a bit of Victorian nonsense of which one can only be grateful that it is relatively short by the period's standards. It is ostensibly the tale of an apparent utopia deep underground.
Like all such efforts, utopia turns out to be a little more dystopian with every passing intelligent thought and the cause of much didactic heavy duty satire on current conditions (those of the 1870s).
Bulwer-Lytton is not a great writer but he has a dry and detached aristocratic sense of humour that makes this a surprisingly easy read even if nothing much happens.
It stays in the library because of its insights into the mentality of the mid-Victorian upper class male and its subsequent influence in cultural history is well outlined in Matthew Sweet's introduction.
There could be an essay here into that mentality but we would fall into that same didactic trap of the author's - but what we do pick up is suspicion of democracy and a genuine fear of female power.
The attitude to women - indistinguishable as Vril-ya from the sort of angel who surmounted Victorian gravestones - is creepy. The hero's penchant for a sixteen year old 'angel' is duly noted. Hmmmmmmm!
There is even a rather counter-intuitive (to us) view of child labour that may be amusing now but is less so when one considers the undertone of reaction to relatively recent liberal-minded legislation.
Still, Bulwer-Lytton was nearly 70 when he wrote this and his reactionary stance derives from his late transition from Whiggery to Conservatism and a rather obvious suspicion of excitable reformism.
The Vril-ya are so like the ideal of Republican Rome that the book might be regarded as an unconscious manifesto for an aristocratic republicanism threatened with submersion into democracy.
It is certainly one of those books which must be read by anyone interested in the early history of 'speculative fiction' (aka 'science fiction').
Most famously, Bulwer-Lytton raises the political problems and possibilities raised by what would later be our nuclear destructive capacity a full seventy five years before it actually appeared.
Bulwer-Lytton is also the unwitting father of the underground tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, of tales of apocalyptic threat from superior races and of Nazi UFOS in the hollow earth - so he cannot be all bad.
Like all such efforts, utopia turns out to be a little more dystopian with every passing intelligent thought and the cause of much didactic heavy duty satire on current conditions (those of the 1870s).
Bulwer-Lytton is not a great writer but he has a dry and detached aristocratic sense of humour that makes this a surprisingly easy read even if nothing much happens.
It stays in the library because of its insights into the mentality of the mid-Victorian upper class male and its subsequent influence in cultural history is well outlined in Matthew Sweet's introduction.
There could be an essay here into that mentality but we would fall into that same didactic trap of the author's - but what we do pick up is suspicion of democracy and a genuine fear of female power.
The attitude to women - indistinguishable as Vril-ya from the sort of angel who surmounted Victorian gravestones - is creepy. The hero's penchant for a sixteen year old 'angel' is duly noted. Hmmmmmmm!
There is even a rather counter-intuitive (to us) view of child labour that may be amusing now but is less so when one considers the undertone of reaction to relatively recent liberal-minded legislation.
Still, Bulwer-Lytton was nearly 70 when he wrote this and his reactionary stance derives from his late transition from Whiggery to Conservatism and a rather obvious suspicion of excitable reformism.
The Vril-ya are so like the ideal of Republican Rome that the book might be regarded as an unconscious manifesto for an aristocratic republicanism threatened with submersion into democracy.
It is certainly one of those books which must be read by anyone interested in the early history of 'speculative fiction' (aka 'science fiction').
Most famously, Bulwer-Lytton raises the political problems and possibilities raised by what would later be our nuclear destructive capacity a full seventy five years before it actually appeared.
Bulwer-Lytton is also the unwitting father of the underground tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, of tales of apocalyptic threat from superior races and of Nazi UFOS in the hollow earth - so he cannot be all bad.
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