A review by litprof
Erewhon by Samuel Butler

inspiring reflective slow-paced

A late 19th century example of speculative fiction's potential to inspire readers to critique their own culture and paradigm through a hypothetical society's legal, religious, economic, and cultural values. The novel even bluntly exposes the economic motives of British conversion colonialism without deigning to disguise the critique. Butler offers a prescient framing of fears over machine singularity through the voice of an Erewhonian scholar in one of a series of memos on Erewhon's culture. These chapters can become tedious after the beautiful early passages depicting the narrator's journey to Erewhon, presumably inspired by the author's own travel through New Zealand.