The Coming Race
Bovril Among the Machines
Bovril is a weird thing. Imagine a meaty paste that makes a kind of drinkable gravy when mixed with hot water. It’s salty, savoury, and not quite as bad as it sounds.
I think of Bovril as quintessentially English, but it’s not. Credit for its invention goes to Scotsman John Lawston Johnston, who was living in Canada when he was commissioned to create a beef product to feed Napoleon III’s army in 1870. Johnston failed then but succeeded later.
By the 1880s, 3,000 shops in the UK were selling the stuff. Early adverts boasted that Bovril was ‘the substance of the beef, not the shadow.’ Later efforts talked it up as a tonic for ‘health, strength, and beauty’. Bovril was revitalising, fortifying, and good for what ails you.
The clue was in the name. Brand ‘Bovril’ was the product of the ancient Latin word ‘bos’ (ox) and the newfangled term ‘vril’. When the advertising men at Bovril wanted to evoke vigour and vitality, they were quite taken by the grip this new word had on the English chattering classes.
Vril’s adoption reminds me of the mid-noughties, when Battlestar Galactica fans insisted on appropriating ‘frak’ before a bad final season consigned it to cultural purgatory.
Like frak, vril came from a science fiction story that dealt with the prospects of machine intelligence. The word refers to a fictional substance harnessed by the Vril-ya, a powerful subterranean people described by Edward Bulwer Lytton in his best-selling 1871 novel The Coming Race.
The book is about a young traveller who explores a natural chasm in a mine. Rappelling into the unknown, the rope snaps and our hero finds himself stranded in what proves to be the backyard of an advanced civilisation living under the earth.
Drawing on subtle theistic imagery, Lytton tells us that the Vril-ya fly like angels on great feathered wings. They are taller than humans, more beautiful, and longer lived. Rather than a formal class system there’s a sort of natural aristocracy based on merit. Tradition is king, with social harmony maintained through custom rather than force.
In the land of the Vril-ya, women are physically stronger and intellectually dominant. They tend to chase men and make marriage proposals, which last initially for three years before couples decide whether to tie another knot.
The underground world runs on vril, a mysterious energy force combining electricity, magnetism, and the arcane. Vril provides artificial light that mimics the sun. It’s used for advanced healing procedures and allows the user to read minds.
It also animates the inanimate. Flying machines float through the sky for exploration, travel, and trade. Sophisticated machines handle agriculture, manufacturing, and mining. The environment is regulated to maintain temperature and air quality, while complex hydraulic systems direct the flow of water.
Most curious are the clockwork automatons powered by vril, which take on the bulk of manual labour. As the narrator explains:
“In all service, whether in or out of doors, they make great use of automaton figures, which are so ingenious, and so pliant to the operations of vril, that they actually seem gifted with reason. It was scarcely possible to distinguish the figures I beheld, apparently guiding or superintending the rapid movements of vast engines, from human forms endowed with thought.”
Thanks to this army of robots, the realm of the Vril-ya enjoys universal material abundance. People spend most of their days learning about the natural world, performing token tasks or enjoying cultural life.
But the arts aren’t exactly flourishing. There are ancient artistic traditions enjoyed by the many, but culturally the Vril-ya are stuck in the mud. No significant works of literature have been produced for generations, music is lauded primarily for technical quality, and buildings are constructed only to be part of a harmonious whole.
Over the range
Twenty years after publication, events like the ‘Vril-ya Bazaar’ were being held at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Billed as one of the first science fiction conventions, the show saw the great and good of English society don costumes to indulge in a spot of indoor fishing or get their fortune read by a mystic dog. Bovril was the refreshment of choice.
As the new century dawned, the novel was still on the mind of the literary classes. When H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, The Guardian wrote:
“The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells.”
Today, it’s the H.G. Wells classic that looms large in the cultural memory. The historian Geoffrey Wagner argues that interest in the ‘forgotten’ The Coming Race only limped on due to a mention of the book in the preface to the second edition of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.
Butler’s masterwork is generally considered to be a significant text in the history of AI. Written around a decade after his famous Darwin Among the Machines essay speculating about the nature of machine intelligence, the book also follows a narrator to the doorstep of an advanced civilisation tucked away from the rest of the world.
Erewhon is eerily close to The Coming Race. Released a year earlier in 1871, the latter prefigures many of the ideas that gave Butler’s work its staying power. Both present self-contained societies that have developed in isolation from the rest of the world, describe places with populations fixated on spiritual and physical health, and play with the idea of mechanical beings capable of acting autonomously.
In Butler’s work, much of the novel is given over to a philosophical text arguing that machines might evolve to eventually dominate humans. Read by our narrator, this book-in-a-book applies the mechanics of Darwinian evolution to technological development and explores early ideas connected to human-machine symbiosis.
We learn that these ideas led the Erewhonians to destroy all complex machinery and partially curtail technological advancement, which is a stance that Butler advocated for in Darwin Among the Machines.
As for whether it’s all satire, that’s a tricky question. With its ‘colleges of unreason’ that send up Oxbridge learning and ‘musical banks’ where citizens pretend to deposit money, it’s obvious that Erewhon is poking fun at Victorian sensibilities. As for the passage on machine evolution, Butler states outright in the preface to the second edition that he wasn’t satirising Darwin’s work.
What is more likely is that Butler was, like all good science fiction writers, using the breathing room offered by the genre to stretch an idea to its logical extreme. He was genuinely troubled by human dependence on technology and harboured deep anxieties about identity in the age of industry.
When he writes about human tending to robot like ‘an affectionate machine-tickling aphid’, I take that to mean that he was less interested in questions of consciousness than about how industrial systems might deplete human autonomy.
As for The Coming Race, Lytton (that is, Baron Lytton of Knebworth) is chiefly concerned with puncturing the project of Victorian democratic reform. There’s constant discussion about the tendency of democracy to slide into chaos, which is even given its own word in the Vril-ya language. When the narrator proudly defends democratic life, his hosts respond with a mixture of condescension and pity.
For those who think that technology is the solution to social ills, we are faced with a scientifically brilliant but culturally stagnant society. The Vril-ya are as ponderous as they are rigid, qualities that force our narrator to flee when he mangles a marriage proposal.
In this sense, The Coming Race is similar to Butler’s novel. Both are interested in what today’s policy experts might regrettably call ‘maximising the benefits of technology, while minimising the risks’.
Impressions
I previously wrote about George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such, which was published a couple of years after The Coming Race (1871) and Erewhon (1872). I didn’t deal with it in the piece, but like these books Impressions is also a kind of satire. Not of the political apparatus, but of a type of person who likes to talk about politics.
Some wonder whether Impressions is in dialogue with Erewhon, but I think it’s almost certainly more interested in Lytton’s work. In a conversation with a character who reminds me of the turgid Mr Casaubon in Eliot’s Middlemarch, she directly name-checks Lytton’s novel:
“Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? And will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The Coming Race was the book filling out concert venues in Victorian London, enjoying more of an afterlife than historians once used to credit it with.
There were people who took the book as a literal account well into the 20th century, and those who thought that the Nazis were secretly on the hunt for vril to win the war. The point here isn’t that people will believe outlandish things, but rather that the cultural staying power of the book is probably greater than assumed.
This shapeshifting quality is why Erewhon is popular with the researchers of the frontier AI labs. Meditations on the strength of the Victorian polity don’t always resonate in London or San Francisco, but worries about controlling intelligent machines certainly do.
Lytton closes his book by telling us that the Vril-ya are isolationist by nature but have an unfortunate tendency to obliterate neighbouring subterranean peoples. Worse still, they also believe they are naturally destined to eventually replace those who live on the surface.
When our narrator returns to America he puts his experience behind him. He avoids talking about the Vril-ya until stricken with illness, when he finally tells anyone who will listen about the ‘inevitable destroyers’ lurking in the deep.
Every era processes anxiety through its own cultural constructions. The Victorians had vril and we have AGI. They had Frankenstein and we have Gattaca. Our concerns might feel closer to reality, but we still deal with them in the same way. We write, we read, we host parties. We make a joke out of it.
And when all’s said and done, we hope we are wrong.