Strains of the Non-Human: The Coming Race, Erewhon, A Crystal Age

Abstract

Not all utopias are meant for us. In the decades before Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopia Looking Backward, three remarkable works appeared that may be variously described as satirical utopias, anti-utopias or utopian fantasies. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887) share the same element of sexual romance that we have already found in Looking Backward and News from Nowhere: a developing relationship between a female utopian and the male visitor to the new world, which on eugenic grounds we should not expect to end happily. However, in The Coming Race, Erewhon and A Crystal Age, the disjunction between the two worlds is much greater than that between nineteenth-century capitalism and the near-future socialist societies of Bellamy and Morris. Bulwer Lytton’s invention of the magical energy source ‘vril’, Butler’s ‘Book of the Machines’ and Hudson’s matrifocal Arcadia belong, instead, to science fiction or (to use Hudson’s term) ‘fantastic romance’.² These texts confront us with the paradoxes of the human and the non-human.

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers — shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle — to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)¹