Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) is part of a subgenre of speculative fiction known as hollow earth fiction—narratives that take place in imaginary worlds under the surface of the earth and borrow from scientific speculation about the composition of the earth’s interior. This tradition of fiction, thought to have begun with Ludwig Holberg’s A Journey to the World under Ground (1741), flowered in the nineteenth century, with Bulwer’s novel recognized as its “crowning achievement” (Sinnema 9). [151]
Energy has a key role in Bulwer’s novel, for The Coming Race depicts the underworld civilization of the Vril-ya, who are named for their mysterious energy source, vril. Vril has no “exact synonym” and proves difficult to explain in overworld terms; as the narrator says, “I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, different names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c.” Variously connected to electricity, mesmerism, ether, and magnetism, vril is a fluid “capable of being raised and disciplined into the mightiest agency over all forms of matter” (59), one that partakes of “natural energetic agencies” (54). It far exceeds the powers of any known fuel in Bulwer’s day, allowing the Vril-ya to influence the weather (and in this sense it is not so different from fossil fuels after all) as well as other people’s minds and “bodies animal and vegetable” (54). Vril serves in the narrative as what Suvin has called the “validation,” a feature of science fiction that provides a “principle of believability,” in this case, a new energy source that can ostensibly account for the different features of this underground society (“Victorian” 152-53).
Bulwer’s energy utopia is also an energy dystopia, one that anticipates nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction capable of instantaneous annihilation of entire population centers. Zee recounts a chilling legend of the Vril-ya, an origin story for their civilization that also prognosticates their future: “we were driven from a region that seems to denote the world you come from,” Zee tells the narrator, “in order to perfect our condition,” and “we are destined to return to the upper world, and supplant all the inferior races now existing therein” (88). The Vril-ya are not just “the coming race,” then; they are the race that is coming for us. Describing a hypothetical conflict between a society of thirty million that lacks vril and fifty thousand of the Vril-ya, Aph-Lin, one of the Vril-ya host, says “it only waits for these savages to declare war, in order to commission some half-a-dozen small children to sweep away their whole population” (109). Thirty million approximates, not coincidentally, the number of people who lived in Britain (including Ireland) at the time this novel appeared. [258-59]
Bibliography
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Extraction Technologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 221. xiv + 285 pages. [Review]
Sinnema, Peter W. “Introduction.” The Coming Race. By Edward Bulwer Lytton. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008.
Suvin, Darko. “The Extraordinary Voyage, the Future War, and Bulwer’s The Coming Race: Three Sub-Genres in British Science Fiction, 1871–1885.” Literature and History 10.2 (1984): 231–48.
Last modified 26 November 2021