Scan barcode
A review by octavia_cade
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
challenging
slow-paced
3.0
Rereading this for a nonfiction project I'm going to be working on, and it's just as batshit as I remember. I think the last time I read it was before I started leaving reviews over on Goodreads, anyway, so time to update my reading list. Anyway, being from New Zealand I have an interest in NZ-adjacent utopias, and the influence of the sheep farm is redolent here. A large part of it's satire, of course - the deliberate opposition of physical and moral illness, for one - but it's hard to miss the taint of eugenics, as well as the near total blanking of the Indigenous population. That last is probably a good thing, given the presentation of the single Maori supporting character, which is unflattering to say the least.
Where the thing really goes off the rails, though, and I say that in the full consciousness that it is an interesting and weirdly compelling jumping of the tracks, yanking the narrative aside for three solid chapters as it does, is in the refusal of the Erewhonians to deal with any mechanism past the onset of the Industrial Revolution. They're worried about machines breeding machines and leaping ahead on the evolutionary ladder, which is certainly a significant theme in science fiction, if rarely explored so early in the history of the genre.
Where the thing really goes off the rails, though, and I say that in the full consciousness that it is an interesting and weirdly compelling jumping of the tracks, yanking the narrative aside for three solid chapters as it does, is in the refusal of the Erewhonians to deal with any mechanism past the onset of the Industrial Revolution. They're worried about machines breeding machines and leaping ahead on the evolutionary ladder, which is certainly a significant theme in science fiction, if rarely explored so early in the history of the genre.