Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron Lytton (1803–1873)

This is a very effective short ghost story about a haunted house in the middle of London, the typical place where no tenant has served out their term and all quitted after a day or two. The author builds up an atmosphere of thick horror and oppression very well within a few pages - "I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life". The narrator is determined to show more find the true rational explanation for the hauntings as he refuses to believe in the supernatural and, in the end, he does identify the source, but it is based on a Medieval monkish curse. A gripping piece of writing. show less

This is a richly written early 19th century novel. While the setting is suitably dramatic as per the title, the actual events of the impending eruption of Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii are very much in the background, against the central plot of the rivalry between the Egyptian priest Arbaces and the Greek Glaucus over the same woman, Ione. Another priest Apaceides (who has converted to Christianity) is murdered by Arbaces and Glaucus is framed it. About to face a hungry lion in the show more arena, he is only saved by the apocalypse itself. This novel is very melodramatic and theatrical to the modern reader, but I enjoyed its richness, despite some occasional overlong digressions - though even these had their poignancy when compared to the ruins found in recent times. show less

Lytton's Coming Race is brief, even if a little slow at points. As a seminal piece of 19th-century science fiction, the whole plot is just an excuse for fictional anthropology, since the protagonist/narrator is utterly unchanged by the experience. The utopian element reflects a little bit of Fourierist background (with one explicit reference to Robert Owen), mostly in the small scale of community and the valorizing of the industry of children.

The reader may weigh the extent to which Lytton show more was actually employing the subterranean civilization of Vril-ya as an alternative in order to criticize modern industrialized nations, democratic politics, and traditional gender mores. The protagonist is never fully persuaded of the superiority of the Vril-ya's social system, but the fact that the English author used a proud American narrator suggests that the fictional speaker's convictions don't necessarily match those of the writer.

What goes without question by the narrator is the physical and technological superiority of the Vril-ya. The book's title alludes to the idea that any full-scale contact between them and the humanity of the Earth's surface will only leave the Vril-ya as complete conquerors. But this scenario is left as an intimation of the future.

This novel was almost as influential on the hollow earth conspiracy meme (and eventually UFO culture) as the same author's Zanoni was for traditional Western occultism. The story seems even to have contributed to Aleister Crowley's Atlantis, where Lytton's Vril energy sets a precedent for Crowley's mysterious ZRO.

Read for it's own sake as a fictional entertainment, The Coming Race is a little exotic, but fairly dated and plodding. Taken as a node in the discourse of 19th-century social reform and occult science, however, it is abidingly curious and engaging. show less

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 show more 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. show less