Search results for ""Author Edward Bulwer-Lytton""

“As I drew near and nearer to the light, the chasm became wider, and at last I saw, to my unspeakable amaze, a broad level road at the bottom of the abyss, illumined as far as the eye could reach by what seemed artificial gas lamps placed at regular intervals, as in the thoroughfare of a great city; and I heard confusedly at a distance a hum as of human voices.…”Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race was one of the most remarkable and most influential books published in the 1870s. The protagonist, a wealthy American wanderer, accompanies an engineer into the recesses of a mine, and discovers the vast caverns of a well-lit, civilized land in which dwell the Vril-ya. Placid vegetarians and mystics, the Vril-ya are privy to the powerful force of Vril—a mysterious source of energy that may be used to illuminate, or to destroy. The Vril-ya have built a world without fame and without envy, without poverty and without many of the other extremes that characterize human society. The women are taller and grander than the men, and control everything related to the reproduction of the race. There is little need to work—and much of what does need to be done is for a novel reason consigned to children.As the Vril-ya have evolved a society of calm and of contentment, so they have evolved physically. But as it turns out, they are destined one day to emerge from the earth and to destroy human civilization.Bulwer-Lytton’s novel is fascinating for the ideas it expresses about evolution, about gender, and about the ambitions of human society. But it is also an extraordinarily entertaining science fiction novel. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of the great figures of late Victorian literature, may have been overvalued in his time—but his extraordinarily engaging and readable work is certainly greatly undervalued today. As Brian Aldiss notes in his introduction to this new edition, this utopian science fiction novel first published in 1871 still retains tremendous interest.

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The Coming Race is the crowning achievement of the genre of hollow earth fiction, in which a hero makes a perilous journey underground and discovers a superior race. The customs and political systems of these “aliens from inner space” are researched and contrasted with the deficient practices of old-fashioned, muddling, imperfect humanity. The subterranean race in this novel, the Vril-ya, are seemingly angelic creatures whose amazing powers come from their harnessing of a force called Vril. Bulwer’s novel is unequaled for the depth of its intellectual explorations—inquiries into an astonishing range of social, political, scientific, religious, linguistic, and sexual issues that are enabled by the hollow earth plot. The novel is accompanied and illuminated in this edition by a broad range of historical materials on evolution, electromagnetism, gender roles, and nineteenth-century science fiction.

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