Mary E Bradley is described in wiki as an American feminist science fiction author and teacher. She was one of the first women to have published a science fiction novel in the United States. Mizora was published in 1889 and so now falls under the genre of proto science fiction. It is an Utopian novel and its full title is "Mizora: A Prophecy. A MSS. found among the private papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch being a true and faithful account of her journey to the interior of the earth, with a careful description of the Country and its inhabitants, their customs. manners and Government." what it does not tell you is that Mizora is only inhabited by women their civilization has progressed to the point where there is no need for men, the sex who only contributed to the destruction of civilization.

There is very little narrative story: Princess Vera Zarovitch in search of adventure trecks as far North as she can go, She takes passage on a whaling ship and finds herself abandoned in an eskimo settlement. She talks them into helping her build a boat launches into unknown waters in the acrtic sea and gets trapped in a whirlpool. She wakes up in a strange land in what becomes a hollow earth story. The vast majority of the book is a description of what she finds there.

She finds herself in a world entirely peopled by women, all of whom are blond, well featured and busily involved in running the country. Their civilisation that they had made seems like a socialist utopia. The State was the beneficent mother that furnished everything and required of her children only there time and application. Teachers were the aristocracy of their society, because they believed that education was the answer to solving most problems.

"All of those lovely traits of character which excite the enthusiast, such as gratitude, honor, charity are the results of education only. They are not the natural instincts of the human mind, but the cultivated one."

Science particularly the science of nature enabled them to live at a very high standard; disease had been eradicated, everybody enjoyed long healthy lives, there was no poverty everybody enjoyed a good standard of living, there was no crime and above all there was no men. They had one proverb that overreached all:

"Labor is the necessity of life"

The women chose what career or tasks they wished to do and everybody was treated equally. They believed that nature had taught them the duty of work and it was said that the person who goes out to seek labor is wiser than the person who lets it seek her. Their passion for science has enabled them to develop many labor saving devices. Their transport system is run on electricity and compressed air, they have invented video conferencing and tablet like devices for communication. The state sets a value for all commodities and nobody would think of charging less or more.

It is only in part 2 of the book that we learn what happened to the men. When the author revealed to the women that she came from a world ruled by men the response was:

You are the product of a people far back in the darkness of civilization

They went on to say that in their dim and distant history when men ruled: it was frequently the case that the most responsible positions in the Government would be occupied by the basest characters, who used their power only for fraud to enrich themselves and their friends by robbing the people. They deceived the masses by preaching purity. There were a series of revolutions which brought the country to its knees and it was only when agreement was reached that women would take over running the country for a period of 100 years that progress was made. New scientific discoveries were made and when women learned to shape nature by fertilising their own eggs then the writing was on the wall for men. The shaping of nature resulted in a programme of eugenics:

We believe that the highest excellence of moral and mental character is alone attainable by a fair race. The elements of evil belong to the dark race."We eliminated them."

The author becomes more concerned when she questions the absence of religion and a belief in an after life. She is told in no uncertain terms that:

"the more ignorant the human mind, the more abject was its slavery to religion;"

Mizora had outgrown the need for men; there had not been any men in their world for three thousand years and had outgrown the need for religion. It was perhaps these contentions that led the author to seek a passage back to her own world after staying in Mizora for twenty years.

This book has everything one could wish for in shaping an utopian world. The format had been used before many times; ever since Sir Thomas Moore's original Utopia printed in 1516. It can become a little dull if you are expecting a narrative story, but this is perhaps one of the most complete and earliest examples of an all female Utopia. It is extremely well thought out and so: 4 stars ( )

This is one of the earliest female utopian stories. Like a lot of utopian stories, there's no kind of plot or anything, more a tour of things the author thinks is interesting about the world they've created. (When and why did we readers turn on this at a literary form? Clearly people in the nineteenth century ate this kind of stuff up.) Interestingly, contrasted with the way some strands of feminism approach science in the present day, this feminist utopia is founded on science; even the cooking is done by chemists, who don't smell or stir their food, just measure it quantifiably. The women of Mizora have majestic, imaginative brains, observing the secrets of Nature and adopting them for their own use. They work as Nature does, they claim, and science is impartial-- it helps anyone willing to work. Not a place I'd want to live, even if I was a woman (the women were vengeful and cruel toward the men when they took over back in the past... and now there are none), I suspect, but a very fascinating book, a way into how scientific thinking was perceived in 1880s America.

As feminist utopias go, this has a clear theme ("Universal education will solve everything!") about which the author is not shy, and some delightful descriptions of video conferencing, Roombas, and transparent silicone (aka "elastic glass").

Less fortunately, it's populated entirely by blondes, and although the narrator herself (a brunette) secretly confesses herself unconvinced that complexion has much to do with the society's success, the history of how these demographics were arrived at is expounded upon so consistently that it does rather convert the theme into "Universal education will solve everything, once women have seized control of the government(*), learned the secret of parthenogenesis(**), and stopped the breeding of any men(***), dark-complexioned folk(****), criminals(****), people with heritable illnesses/disabilities(****), or other undesirables(****)."

(*) So far so good.
(**) Neat stuff.
(***) Oh, hey, why not.
(****) Er, wait several minutes here.

I mean, I'm all up in the free education and free food freeing people up to work in the job best suited them, and the idea that this could make some pretty profound impacts on poverty thus disease thus crime. But couldn't we have stopped there without getting eugenics into the mix? Le sigh. ( )

see http://www.sfsite.com/09a/miz88.htm ( )

So, hm. Kinda more enjoyable than that other hollow-earth book The Coming Race, the two of which I think would work nicely together in a great contrast essay. The idealised utopian folks still practice the arts, to the point of crazy ability (they have flexible glass and all sorts of neat shit). There exists a lovely balance and interaction between science and art. I gotta wonder if the author and narrator's gender has anything to do with that. Bonus! The utopia is populated only by ladies.And these ladies have made a world where everybody gets educated all they need/want for free, nobody is hungry, or ever in need, thanks to a pretty damn involved State. Course, all this benefit comes from the no men and breeding out the dark-complexioned.Oh yeah, and romantic love and passion, like religious feeling, is a barbaric, ancient and outmoded thing, so it is actually a kind of boring utopia. Like all utopias. ( )