User:Denever6/The Coming Race

The Coming Race
a.k.a.
Vril: The Power of the Coming Race
	Front Covers
Author	Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Original title	The Coming Race
Language	English
Publisher	Broadview Press, Hesperus Press, Magoria Books, Wildside Press, Wesleyan University Press
Publication date	1870; Reprints:; August 2002; August 7, 2002; September 28, 2006; February 9, 2007; March 5, 2007
Media type	Paperback
Pages	124 - 280 (depending on edition)

The Coming Race, later reprinted as 'Vril: The Power of the Coming Race', is a novel written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton. It was first published in 1871 and was so well received that it had to be reprinted repeatedly in order to satisfy demand for the book. The novel is one of the earliest examples of science fiction, sometimes cited as the first of the genre.

Being written as part narrative and part field research, from the point of view of its narrator, many early readers presumed The Coming Race to be non-fiction. Many subsequent writers and commentators of occult persuasion consistently treated its contents as accurate and historic, basing theories and books upon their interpretations of the fictional narrator's account.

Please see the article Vril for further information about subsequent works based on or related to this book.

Plot summary

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Introduction

The book begins with an introduction from the narrator, in which he writes briefly about his personal history--albeit with identifying details, such as dates and placenames, apparently redacted prior to publication. These redactions are mysteriously explained thusly:

The reader will understand, ere he close this narrative, my reason for concealing all clue to the district of which I write, and will perhaps thank me for refraining from any description that may tend to its discovery.

The narrator claims to be a young, independently wealthy American man from a distinguished family, who sought to travel the world before settling down. As the introduction gives way to the beginning of the story, the narrator visits a mine with a friend, a mining engineer assigned to said mine. After the first descent, in which the narrator does not accompany his friend all the way, the mining engineer becomes noticeably preoccupied with whatever he saw or experienced, but refuses the narrator's inquiries until after becoming inebriated.

The drunk mining engineer then claims to have seen lights, roads, and buildings and to have heard sounds of civilization at the deepest reaches of the mine. The narrator suggests that they revisit the place together the next day. The mining engineer reluctantly agrees.

Subterranean World

The second descent goes awry, and as both the narrator and his friend arrive to the bottom, rocks fall from above, injuring the narrator mildly and the killing the mining engineer. Immediately thereafter, the narrator can scarcely begin to grieve before a large "monstrous reptile" with a crocodile-like head menacingly appears and drags away the carrion.

The narrator heads toward the lit road that his unfortunate friend had seen the night before, and eventually makes contact with one of the inhabitants of this underground world: a tall, winged, beardless man whose face "is the face of the sculptured sphinx—so regular in its calm, intellectual, mysterious beauty". The sight inspires awe and terror in the narrator, and he falls cowering on his knees.

He is subsequently taken into one of the buildings, and encounters other individuals of the same race. After some debate, understood by the narrator only through interpreting body language, he is sent to be a guest with a family of these underground people.

After being apparently healed through the use of a staff, the narrator wakes up to find that he appears to have taught his hosts English, presumably while under some sort of hypnosis. Being somewhat restored, the narrator begins to make observations in an increasingly systematic manner, interspersed with explanations or elaborations from his host, as well as records of noteworthy events encountered whilst making said observations.

The narrators notes are of a wide and scientific range about the underground world of the Vril-ya, as he learns his hosts are called, including sociology, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, biology, and natural history.

Important Revelations

The narrator quickly learns that the Vril-ya are highly advanced beyond mankind above ground, thanks chiefly to their mastery of Vril. Vril is:

I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies

Though he makes concerted efforts to show the United States in a good and positive light, it quickly becomes clear that to the Vril-ya, democratic institutions are seen as certain precursors to societal chaos and decay. In fact, the subterranean worlds are said by them to be populated by peoples who have not mastered Vril, and therefore are not considered to be Vril-ya, who live governed by similarly barbaric institutions.

In one conversation, it comes to light that while the Vril-ya harbour no active ill-will toward these barbaric peoples, they neither shrink from destroying them en masse if they threaten or harm Vril-ya:

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.

The narrator thus realizes that inevitably, when one day a group of Vril-ya ascend from underground in order to find new habitable areas, humanity will surely be destroyed in much the same way.

Romance & Denoument

Two romantic entanglements figure prominently in the story. The first being the infatuation of the narrator's host's daughter, Zee, with the narrator; the second being the same by the daughter of the city's Chief. Upon first learning of the the former, the narrator is told that marital union with a Vril-ya would be considered dangerous and might lead to his extermination.

Understandably, the narrator rejects Zee's advances; even when Zee gains permission to enter a non-child-bearing union with the narrator. The advances of the Chief's daughter, however, appear to go to the narrator's head and he briefly entertains thoughts of what such a union might bring him--after all, he reasons, the Chief's daughter surely could not be refused or thwarted.

Quickly, however, Zee forcably steals the narrator away and puts him to sleep. After he awakes, the discussion that ensues makes it clear that the Chief's daughter's affections are even more dangerous than Zee's affections were. Zee claims to have said the narrator from certain destruction.

On a subsequent day, another acquaintance of the narrator confesses that he was charged with destroying him; but offers to make further entreaties on his behalf. The entreaties ultimately are unsuccessful, and when Zee learns of this, she defies her cities Chief, for the love of the narrator, and clears way for him to return to the world above.

Having returned, the narrator closes by saying that he felt it his duty to warn humanity through his writings before his death, now predicted as imminent by his doctors.

Reception of the book

NOTE: This article is only concerned with the book, The Coming Race. For other interpretations, and the cultural impact of concepts therein, please see the Vril article.

The book was quite popular in the late 19th century, and for a time the word "Vril" came to be associated with "life-giving elixirs". Particularly, because many early readers mistakenly believed the book to be an accurate, non-fiction account.

Subsequently, the concept of Vril and the notion of an advanced underground race was embraced and extended by other writers and thinkers. It is important to note that much of these subsequent interpretations have either little to do with the contents of the book, or are downright contradictory to it.

Despite comparitively wide dissemination of ideas originally found in The Coming Race, the book today is relatively unknown.

The World of The Coming Race

Vril

NOTE: This article is only concerned with the book, The Coming Race. For other interpretations, and the cultural impact of concepts therein, please see the Vril article.

Vril-ya

Society

Biology

Philosophy

Political System

Literature

Language

Customs

Debatable Interpretations

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Though many readers assumed the book to be partly or fully truthful and accurate, there is no strong reason to doubt that it is a work of fiction.

The author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, never claimed that The Coming Race was non-fiction. In contrast, he called his occult novel, Zanoni, "a truth for those who can comprehend it, and an extravagance for those who cannot".
Though the Vril-ya in the book suggest that as a civilization progresses, psychic/mental powers will become increasingly firmly established as scientific fact, humanity's experience is just the opposite. Psychic powers that are testable have been consistently proven questionable.
Though the narrator of the manuscript claims to be American, the text is ripe with Britishisms.
At one point, the narrator writes, "The letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly always denotes excellence of power;" Though no mention is made of the script of the Vril-ya, the quoted portion hints at the subconscious (and given the proposed history of the Vril-ya, altogether ludicrous) assumption that the Vril-ya use the Latin alphabet to write. This is clearly an oversight by the story's creative writer. Such a statement would not have been written by the narrator without explanation, were his experiences real. He either would have made notes about the writing system of the Vril-ya, or would have noted, with much incredulity, their use of the Latin alphabet.

The Vril-ya as Aryans

According to the book:

"I arrived at the conviction that this people--though originally not only of our human race, but, as seems to me clear by the roots of their language, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilisation of the world; and having, according to their myths and their history, passed through phases of society familiar to ourselves,--had yet now developed into a distinct species with which it was impossible that any community in the upper world could amalgamate: And that if they ever emerged from these nether recesses into the light of day, they would, according to their own traditional persuasions of their ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties of man."

In essence, the narrator believes the language of the Vril-ya to be of the same origin as Aryan languages. A statement akin to saying that Russian is of the same origin as Germanic languages--true, on account of both languages being Indo-European. The passage also notably does not outright confirm that the narrator believes that there is also an ethnic connection between the Vril-ya and the Aryans. While linguistic connections were, at the time of the book's writing, considered certain signs of shared ethnicity; subsequent passages explain that the Vril-ya believe themselves descended from frogs, as we believe ourselves descended from apes:

"Pardon me," answered Aph-Lin: "in what we call the Wrangling or Philosophical Period of History, which was at its height about seven thousand years ago, there was a very distinguished naturalist, who proved to the satisfaction of numerous disciples such analogical and anatomical agreements in structure between an An and a Frog, as to show that out of the one must have developed the other. They had some diseases in common; they were both subject to the same parasitical worms in the intestines; and, strange to say, the An has, in his structure, a swimming-bladder, no longer of any use to him, but which is a rudiment that clearly proves his descent from a Frog. Nor is there any argument against this theory to be found in the relative difference of size, for there are still existent in our world Frogs of a size and stature not inferior to our own, and many thousand years ago they appear to have been still larger."

Readers who believe the Aryan passage to be thinly veiled admiration for the Vril-ya as some sort of Aryan Supermen should note that the modern connotations of these terms are heavily influenced by Nazi and White Supremacist Propaganda developed and produced decades after the writing and initial publication of The Coming Race.

The Vril-ya as Descendants of Atlantis

Nowhere does the book contain any statement or even suggestion as such. The Atlantis connection is entirely the work of subsequent occult writers who believed The Coming Race to be a non-fiction work.

Hollow Earth

The book contains no suggestion of hollow earth. The world of the Vril-ya are always described as being underground tunnels, artificially lit (using Vril). Hollow earth suggestions and theories are only found in subsequent works.

References in popular culture

The still-popular English drink Bovril takes its name from the combination of the words "Bovine" and "Vril".

The story may have inspired Nikola Tesla when he invented remote control. While Tesla denied this, biographer Marc J. Seifer says the inventor probably knew the story given Bulwer-Lytton's popularity at the time.

The book is mentioned in the song by David Bowie "Oh! You Pretty Things": "Look out at your children / See their faces in golden rays / Don't kid yourself they belong to you / They're the start of the coming race"

"Vril" is also mentioned in the book "HACKERS" by Steven Levy.

The English thrash metal band Sabbat refers to Vril in their song "Behind the Crooked Cross"

References

Sources

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1871). The Coming Race. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
The Coming Race at Project Gutenberg
HTML version of the book.