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A review by reasie
The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
3.0
I would recommend this book to those Steampunk aficionados of my acquaintance who wish to emulate the overblown prose of the age of steam. Because DAYUM. This boy never saw a flower but he put some gilding on it.
Enjoyable in its way, it was refreshing for its time, with some nuance - the utopia under the earth is not without price, though I question his reasoning that a peaceful mankind would stop making literature for its own sake, I accept it as I accept that the angelic women of the Vril-ya have slight mustaches.
Oh! The gender role reversal! It's not complete, which makes it more interesting. He has recourse to "try to look pretty" as women compliment him in a society where women are the wooers and men the wooed, though his only descriptions of married women about the Vril-ya are housekeepers who, he continually emphasizes, are the most submissive wives ever. This underground utopia, we are told, had complete gender equality - any job can be done by either sex, but we are never shown a female administrator or engineer. There's volumes that could be written about his nascent feminism and gender-role assumptions. It's downright quaint, honestly, much like the author's repeated references to a wholly incorrect understanding of evolution, wherein parents can acquire traits and pass them on. CUTE. Outdated. But... as valid as our modern science fiction, working within the constraints of knowledge as it stood then. Overall I am glad I read it, though there are a few painfully pedantic parts.
Enjoyable in its way, it was refreshing for its time, with some nuance - the utopia under the earth is not without price, though I question his reasoning that a peaceful mankind would stop making literature for its own sake, I accept it as I accept that the angelic women of the Vril-ya have slight mustaches.
Oh! The gender role reversal! It's not complete, which makes it more interesting. He has recourse to "try to look pretty" as women compliment him in a society where women are the wooers and men the wooed, though his only descriptions of married women about the Vril-ya are housekeepers who, he continually emphasizes, are the most submissive wives ever. This underground utopia, we are told, had complete gender equality - any job can be done by either sex, but we are never shown a female administrator or engineer. There's volumes that could be written about his nascent feminism and gender-role assumptions. It's downright quaint, honestly, much like the author's repeated references to a wholly incorrect understanding of evolution, wherein parents can acquire traits and pass them on. CUTE. Outdated. But... as valid as our modern science fiction, working within the constraints of knowledge as it stood then. Overall I am glad I read it, though there are a few painfully pedantic parts.