The Coming Race

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The Coming Race by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

A controversial science fiction novel, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race is certainly an exciting and intriguing piece of writing. The novel features a subterranean race that has escaped from its subterranean environment and sets out to conquer the surface of the Earth, too.

The novel was first published in 1871and it was very successful not only due to the quick-paced and eventful story line, but also due to its symbolism. One cannot but make the connection between the subterranean race featured in the book and humanity, with all its colonialist endeavors. The events are presented through the eyes of an American civil engineer who somehow falls into the underground world, which he first experiences as a real paradise. He learns that the race living in that paradise-like environment is the descendant of beings who escaped from the surface and have evolved to such an advanced state due to an energy source they have discovered.

Being a novel written in the same year as Darwin’s The Descent of Man, the reader comes across the most significant and influential theories about the origin of mankind and science. We have not only the enlightened, angel-like beings of the subterranean race, but also creatures of a much darker order, savages who are denied the benefits of energy and therefore live in darkness, both in the physical and in the intellectual sense of the word.

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