The Coming Race

The Coming Race

The Coming Race, narrated by an unnamed young American, opens with him exploring a mine abroad with an engineer friend who discovers a strange chasm emitting artificial light. Descending together to investigate, the engineer falls to his death when their rope fails, and the narrator flees a monstrous reptile emerging from the rock, finding himself alone in a subterranean world. He walks a lamplit road through cultivated valleys of strange vegetation, encountering a winged, godlike being whose calm sphinx-like face fills him with instinctive dread. This figure, later revealed as Aph-Lin, brings the narrator into his household and city. There, an automaton escorts him inward, and he meets Aph-Lin's children, including the boy Taee and the formidable daughter Zee, a scholar at the College of Sages who becomes his teacher and, through trance-induced learning aided by the mysterious force vril, gives him command of the language. The narrator learns this people are called the Ana, part of the vast underground civilization of the Vril-ya. Their ancestors fled an ancient deluge on the upper earth and, over millennia, mastered vril—an all-permeating force comprising electricity, magnetism, and other energies—enabling them to heal, destroy, illuminate their sunless world, and operate machinery and automata. Discovery of vril's destructive power ended warfare among them, since any individual, even a child, could annihilate an army; this led to small, peaceful, decentralized communities called Vril-ya, governed by a nearly powerless supreme magistrate (the Tur) under near-total voluntary order, with no crime, poverty, or class struggle. Aph-Lin, chief of the Light-preserving Council, and Zee explain Vril-ya society: children perform all labor and dangerous tasks (including destroying hostile beasts) until marriageable age, then inherit independence; Gy-ei (women) are physically and magically superior to Ana (men) and do the courting in marriage, though by ancient custom they've renounced lethal domestic power after a jealous murder generations earlier. The narrator learns their history, philology (a language evolved from monosyllabic to inflectional forms), their disdain-tinged religion (belief in one Creator, no theological disputes, faith in a future state and even in the enduring life of lesser creatures), and their aesthetic decline—literature and poetry have withered since passions like ambition and rivalry vanished, though science and music persist. He recounts the legendary Batrachian (frog) ancestry myth debated by ancient philosophers, and the class of "barbarian" Ana outside Vril-ya civilization, including a numerous, quarrelsome nation the narrator uneasily recognizes as resembling his own democratic homeland—which Aph-Lin and Zee regard as a doomed Koom-Posh (mob rule) destined to degenerate into Glek-Nas (societal collapse). Taee takes the narrator to destroy a giant reptile using vril, demonstrating the weapon's terrifying power. As Zee's affections toward him deepen, the narrator grows increasingly alarmed, realizing intermarriage would be forbidden and dangerous (offspring might be "carnivorous," and a rejected or crossed Gy could destroy him with vril). He confesses his fear to Aph-Lin, who confirms the peril candidly, noting Zee cannot be controlled and that the narrator, as a "Tish" (barbarian), could be destroyed if he encourages her. The narrator asks to return home, but Aph-Lin says this requires the Tur's permission, which likely will not be granted, since the community fears exposure to the upper world. The text breaks off amid Aph-Lin's account of Vril-ya economic customs and his own reluctant inheritance of wealth and civic duty.

By Edward Bulwer-lytton · First published 1871 · Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Utopian and Dystopian · 29 chapters · 72,522 words

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I am a native of _____, in the United States of America. My ancestors migrated from England in the reign of Charles II.; and my grandfather was not undistinguished in the War of Independence. My family, therefore, enjoyed a somewhat high social position in right of birth; and being also opulent, they were considered disqualified for the public service. My father once ran for Congress, but was signally defeated by his tailor. After that event he interfered little in politics, and lived much in his library. I was the eldest of three sons, and sent at the age of sixteen to the old country, partly to complete my literary education, partly to commence my commercial training in a mercantile firm at Liverpool. My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.

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The Coming Race is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edward Bulwer-lytton, dated 1871 CE.

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Science Fiction · Fantasy · Adventure · Romance · Dystopian · Utopian · Speculative Fiction · Subterranean Fiction · Lost World · Hidden Civilization · Racism · Eugenics

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