In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel, The Coming Race, later classified as science fiction, the author writes a futuristic novel that complemented his historical fiction.

In this plot, often considered a satire on Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, an American mining engineer travels to Earth’s center after a miner acquaintance tells him of descending into a crevice and spotting a mysterious light, which appeared to come from within the depths of the Earth. The narrator/protagonist agrees to accompany the miner back into the “abyss” to investigate, but after arriving, the miner dies in a fall, and the narrator immediately encounters “a vast and terrible head, with open jaws and dull, ghastly, hungry eyes” belonging to a monstrous reptile, “infinitely larger” than a crocodile or alligator.

Thus begins his quest, which includes encounters with winged creatures that have human characteristics, such as the power to learn English. They control a mysterious energy, called “vril,” which Zee, a female member of the College of Sages, attempts to define for the narrator. No English term equates to vril, but the narrator explains it as electricity that also “comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature,” such as “magnetism, galvanism, etc.” Vril gives the creatures incredible powers, including the ability to influence the weather and to “exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.”

Following the novel’s publication, the term vril became associated with strength and was incorporated into names of elixirs, such as Bovril, a beef broth with additives believed to benefit humans.

In addition to monsters, the narrator encounters all the elements expected of science fiction, such as altered natural forces, futuristic domiciles and machines, including “automatons,” or robots, and utopian conditions, including a lack of poverty and illness. All this is achieved, however, by conformation to certain rules that prove restrictive of personal freedom. The narrator pronounces that the social system governing “the Vril-ya prohibits their development of individual greatness, such as that observed in Hannibal, Washington, Demosthenes, Webster, Wendel Holmes, Shakespeare and Molière.”

The protagonist offers a lengthy discussion of the culture’s language and relays several myths relating to philosophy and the origin of the species, which grew from the “Wrangling Period of History,” during which time some believed the frog race preceded the human. The theories that follow form the basis for analysis of the novel as a satire against evolution; one learned figure informs the narrator that two schools rage “against each other, one asserting the An (man) to be the perfected type of the Frog; the other that the Frog was the highest development of the An.” In addition, “moralists were divided in opinion with the naturalists, but the bulk of them sided with the Frog-preference school,” because in moral conduct there was “no doubt as to the superiority of the Frog.”

Eventually, romance with one of the foreign beings tempts the protagonist, but he predictably rejects that opportunity in order to return home.

While its detail may prove tedious to some readers, the novel offers an entertaining look at early science fiction with an editorial bent that concludes with the narrator longing to depart Utopia and return to his own flawed culture. Marxist critics find interesting the lack of financial structure in the perfect world and perhaps even the ironic setting, where a civilization has literally moved underground in order to reach perfect equitable order. Feminist critics note that primarily female professors make up the College of Sages, specializing in “philosophy, the history of remote periods, and such sciences as entomology, conchology, etc.” The female’s better-perfected “nervous organization” renders her especially perceptive to the powers of vril, a trait supporting the traditional engendered attribution of intuition to women. Psychoanalytic critics note the descent into space intellectually controlled by women with the masculine intrusion into the space by a human man.

Bibliography
Christiansen, Allan Conrad. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th century science fiction, automatons in literature, bovril origin, darwinism satire, early science fiction, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, evolution in literature, feminist science fiction, feminist utopia, historical fiction crossover, literary analysis the coming race, marxist science fiction, psychoanalytic literary criticism, satirical science fiction, sci-fi social critique, science fiction and gender, speculative fiction, subterranean fiction, the coming race, underground civilizations, utopia and dystopia, utopian fiction, victorian science fiction, vril, vril energy, vril-ya