Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race

To be pitied is the writer whose satire of Utopian fantasies is mistaken for the actual thing. Even more to be pitied are the people who take his Utopian vision and make it a key belief in their esoteric religion. Such is the case of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1871 novel The Coming Race was not only one of the most popular novels of the 19th century but whose story of a technologically-superior subterranean civilization inspired theosophists and Nazi occultists. 

It wasn't for any lack of trying on Bulwer-Lytton's part. In a friendly letter he explicitly wrote "I don't think people have caught or are likely to catch the leading idea of the book, which is this: - Assuming that all the ideas of philosophical reformers could be united and practically realised, the result would be firstly, a race that must be fatal to ourselves; our society could not amalgamate with it; it would be deadly to us, not from its vices but from its virtues. Secondly, the realisation of these ideas would produce a society which we should find extremely dull, and in which the current equality would prohibit all greatness."  Nevertheless, his underground civilization of Vril-ya captured imaginations in the 19th century with its possibilities. Those who wished for a mere interesting Scientific Romance were rewarded, as were those "philosophical reformers" who considered that incompatibility with modern society as a good thing. Then there were those who took things a little too far.

Illustration from The Coming Race depicting the
underground society and its winged citizens, the Vril-ya.

Lillie Devereux Blake's A Divided Republic

There are a handful of good reasons to read the utopian ideals of the past. One might simply be the aesthetics of Victorian retro-futurism, seeing how people of the 19th century actually did envision the things we take for granted today: our televisions, computers, the Internet, mass transit, and so forth. Sometimes it is to play a little game of what they got right and what they got wrong. But deeper than that, they are an opportunity to understand the "interior world" of different philosophies and worldviews... To understand not only their ambitions for people and society, but what they think of people and society in general. Nested into utopian fantasies are theses on human nature, human failing, and human interaction.

It is one thing to analyze failed Victorian worldviews through Victorian fiction... It is another to analyze worldviews that are still carried with us today, worldviews which never left or which get perennially resurrected. This is even more pertinent when the worldview is not simply a failed worldview of the past, but a worldview that is currently failing us today. And that is what brings us to Lillie Devereux Blake's A Divided Republic. 

Published in two parts in the February and March 1887 issues of The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health magazine (which is interesting enough in itself) and eventually reprinted in her 1892 anthology A Daring Experiment and Other Stories, A Divided Republic argues for women's suffrage by proposing that women simply up and leave. En masse, the ladyfolk of the Eastern United States migrate to the territories of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. In return, the men from those territories are shipped back East. Left to their own devices, male society rapidly deteriorates until they literally beg to get the women back. 

At the root of Blake's thought experiment is the idea of what we would today recognize as "identity politics." This philosophy, which has regained considerable traction in the last decade, fundamentally rejects the idea of individual personhood and dignity. In its place, identity politics holds as axiomatic truth that individuals are reducible to actors on behalf of identity collectives. As actors for identity collectives, individuals work to reinforce structures that maintain power for the collective. In this worldview, there is no such concept of human rights because there is no such concept as human beings. Rather, identity collectives are conceived of having or lacking "privileges" which are exercised by the collective as a collective. 

Though self-evidently wrong, more serious and considered forms of identity politics manage to focus on identity collectives that may actually give shape to behaviour, like religion and philosophy, political affiliation, or nationality. Less well-considered forms will at least base identity on tangible assets like economic class or ethnicity. The worst and most self-evidently false forms of identity politics focus on crude physical attributes, namely race, gender, and sexuality. These physical attributes are believed to form coherent blocks of political interest, usually in dialectic opposition to collectives with other attributes, i.e.: Men vs. Other (Women, Trans, Nonbinary), White vs. Other ("People of Colour"), Straight vs. Other (LGBTQ2+AA), Cis vs. Other (Trans, Nonbinary, etc.).

In what way are they self-evidently wrong? For the simple fact that people are individuals and never, in the entire history of humankind, have skin colour, genitals, or where people stick those genitals ever formed a coherent block of political interest. For the approximately 8,000 years that "white people" have existed, they have always been divided by ethnicity, nationality, economic class, political affiliation, philosophy, and religion, not to mention the naked interests of personal self-preservation. In the entire 19th century, there were approximately 7 years, added together, where there wasn't being a war being fought somewhere in Europe. Mark Twain once quipped that no one has spilled more French blood than other Frenchmen. For thousands of years prior to the arrival of Europeans to the shores of Africa or the Americas, Indigenous people fought with each other. Many of those resumed in terrifying ethnic conflicts after Europeans pulled out, such as the Rwandan Genocide. The Spanish were only able to conquer the Aztecs because they were assisted by other Indigenous nations who were sick of the Aztecs' bullshit. The evil of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade would have been impossible without the crucial first step of African peoples being captured and sold by other Africans. In the United States, slavery was abolished after 1.8 million "white people" fought a civil war against 750,000 other "white people." The term "People of Colour" is especially bizarre, as though Zulu and Japanese and Pakistani and Apache are all the same thing. These truths are so self-evident that even proponents of identity politics themselves realize it, inventing concepts like intersectionality theory. By admitting that people are shaped by a nearly infinite variety of intersecting identity vectors, it becomes apparent that the ultimate end of intersectionality theory is individualism. Everyone is different, and the only way to deal with individual people is as individuals. Intersectionality theory is a tacit admission that identity politics doesn't work as a model of reality. Identity politics is racism rebranded as "social justice," and the only antidote to racism is individualism, not more racism.

That "white people" and "People of Colour" and men and women and gay people and straight people and cis people and trans people fall everywhere across the political, religious, ethnic, national, and economic spectrum is distinctly highlighted by a story like A Divided Republic. Blake's story hinges first on the notion that women, as an identity collective, would just all agree to leave as one united body of coherent political interest. That simply would not happen. Gender does not form coherent blocks of political interest, especially where it would come to completely abandoning husbands, fathers, children, and alcohol. According to a 2013 survey, only 23% of American women identified as feminists (with 8% identifying as anti-feminists), even though 82% believe in equality of the sexes. One of the most shocking outcomes of the 2016 US election is that 42% of women voted for Donald Trump, which rises to 62% for "white" women without a college education.

Blake goes on to portray life in the respective republics. The male republic is, of course, every crude stereotype of men. It is a brutish, careless, reckless, vice-riddled society deprived of its civilizing members. By contrast, the female republic's greatest problem is boredom. A society composed entirely of women would be far too civilized... Without a need for police, courts, and jails (and saloons), the female republic could turn its attention fully to the moral, physical, and intellectual perfection of its members. The type of culture described briefly by Blake was given a fuller treatment in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 novel Herland, where it was also granted more of a critique (albeit possibly unintentionally). Perfection is dull and eventually the women are excited to hear that the men are willing to make every concession just to get the women back. It would be unthinkable that women might have conflict between themselves, because that would imply that women are individuals with their own personalities, ambitions, and problems apart of the interests of the collective. It was also unthinkable that amidst architecture, engineering, and mountaineering, one of the things they might also pick up now that there are no men to stop them is alcohol. 

A Divided Republic is a short story... this critique is almost as long as the story itself... so one cannot reasonably expect Blake to give more nuanced portrayals of the benefits and challenges of her two republics. Yet when forced by brevity to distill her idea down to its most basic form, it is this: the essential characteristic of women as an identity collective is morality and the essential characteristic of men as an identity collective is barbarism, and therefore men need women to civilize them, and therefore men owe women the vote and the veto over men's lives. The idea that women are inherently more moral, more pure, more honest, and more civilized still permeates identity politics to this day, along with the patronizing idea that women are also weaker, more naive, more vulnerable, and less capable of managing their own affairs, thus requiring the paternalistic involvement of the State in every aspect of their lives in order to keep them safe. What they need to be kept safe from, of course, is men, who should apparently be packed with a WHMIS label. 

Of course women were rightly entitled to the vote and to full legal equality. But that entitlement was not owed on the grounds that women as an identity collective are just better than men. They were rightly entitled to it because they are human beings, fellow individuals who are no better and no worse than men. Unfortunately, despite a brief flirtation with a properly ordered idea of social justice rooted in individual dignity -  "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." - the kind of identity politics expressed in A Divided Republic have taken hold again.

Without further ado, A Divided Republic by Lillie Devereux Blake, as it appeared in The Phrenological Journal... 

  

Early Canadian Futurism: Tisab Ting, The Storm of '92, and The Dominion in 1983

Unlike its neighbour to the south, Canada has no strong history of Scientific Romances. It has only really been in the last 40 years that the Dominion has developed a strong voice in Science Fiction as a whole. Even then, amidst the Robert J. Sawyers, A.E. van Voghts and William Gibsons, there is still plenty of ambivalence towards the genre. The great dame of Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood, still seems undecided on whether to allow her works to stoop to being called SF. 

The oddity of our lack of Scientific Romances comes into sharper focus when considering that Canada is, truly and uniquely, an invention of the Victorian Era. From earlier historic roots among Indigenous peoples, fur traders, and early French and British settlers, the Dominion of Canada as a single political institution began life with Confederation in 1867, when the independent colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia unified. In 1870, the Hudson's Bay Company sold its vast western holdings to the fledgling nation, all of which became the North-West Territories. Other colonies joined later, and other provinces were carved out of the NWT. Perhaps the most influential member was British Columbia. It joined Confederation in 1871 by the promise that within a decade, a Transcontinental Railway would be built connecting the Pacific coast to the Atlantic.

Not only is Canada a product of the Victorian Era, but it is even more so a product of the Steam Age. Perhaps no country on earth owes as much of its existence to the construction of a single railway. The driving of the last spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia, in 1885 linked Vancouver to the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway at a distance of some 5000 kilometres, allowing for the fast movement of immigrants, troops, and tourists through the rugged Canadian northwoods and beyond. Thanks to Canadian Pacific Railway's fleet of Royal Mail Steamers, the well-heeled could travel from England to Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand by way of Canada, journeying halfway across the world without ever leaving the British Empire.    

Imperial pride reflects in two of the earliest Canadian futurist tales... The only three early Canadian futurist tales to speak of. The Dominion in 1983, The Storm of '92, and Tisab Ting; or, The Electrical Kiss share the same essential conceit of showing the status of Canada in the decades hence. Published in 1883, 1889, and 1896 respectively, all dared to make technological and political predictions while imposing Victorian attitudes upon the 20th century.

Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem by Sutton E. Griggs

Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem, written in 1899 by Rev. Sutton E. Griggs, is a fascinating, prescient novella. In it, two men vie for control of a shadowy organization of African-American militants. One is the privileged mulatto Bernard Belgrave who advocates for full-out race war with European-Americans. The other is the self-made, full-blooded Belton Piedmont, who advocates for racial integration. The premise of a shadowy, militant African-American "empire within an empire" might seem like an ethnic peril novel except that Griggs was himself an African-American minister and social activist reflecting on the political forces in tension within African-American communities in the thirty years since the American Civil War. In that it is fascinating. It is prescient in how these forces are still at play in African-American communities today.

Despite being the greatest moral accomplishment in American history, and the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin becoming the best-selling novel of the 19th century, the abolition of slavery did not immediately translate to full material equality for African-Americans. Poverty was the main inhibitor to equality, with up to 80% of African-American farmers eking out a living as sharecroppers. Violence was also an effective tool.

The Ku Klux Klan, White League, Red Shirts, and independent actors emerged as domestic terrorists using violence and intimidation to suppress African-American voters. Between 1890 and 1910, Democrat legislators throughout the 11 former Confederate states passed Jim Crow Laws mandating poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements that effectively disenfranchised the majority of African-Americans, most of whom still lived in the South. Many counties, and some whole states, lacked a single registered African-American voter. Being ineligible for the vote eliminated these African-Americans from serving in public office. They became, for all intents and purposes, politically invisible. This in turn made them vulnerable to regionally-instituted segregationist laws and continued white supremacist violence.

The response to this violence and disenfranchisement among African-Americans and their allies was varied. The Exodus of 1879 lead 40,000 people to simply up and leave the South for Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado to forge a new life. It was also common for African-Americans to band together for protection into "Union Leagues" organized by the Republican Party. Contrary to its reputation today, the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln and spearheads of the abolitionist and integrationist movement through the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. In fact, the Republicans became increasingly under the control of African-American factions, with its white supremacists defecting to the segregationist Democratic Party. The modern Republican party was a product of the 1960's "Southern Strategy," when the Republican Party sought to win over white Democrat voters in the South, and the 1980's "Moral Majority."

An 1879 Harper's Weekly illustration of
"Exodusters" on their way to Kansas. 

Illustration of the 1876 "Colored National Convention" held in Nashville.

Education was a key component in African-American emancipation. The creation of secondary and post-secondary schools became a priority of Northern churches and the federal government. Whereas only 22 African-Americans had graduated college prior to the Civil War, the number doubled to 44 in the 1860's, and rose again to 313 in the 1870's, 738 in the 1880's, and 1126 in the 1890's. Whereas the average US worker made $200-$400 annually in 1910, college-educated African-Americans were making approximately $15,000, using their wealth and education to improve their communities.

These realities are all expressed through Imperium in Imperio, as a pair of educated African-Americans struggle for the heart and future of their people through a conspiracy shaped by violence and political disenfranchisement.

Sultana's Dream, a Muslim feminist utopia

It is not without truth, or reason, that Science Fiction has traditionally been a Western-dominated and male-dominated genre. Scientific Romances grew out of the intersection between scientific investigation, technological invention, and colonial exploitation, as the most educated classes in Western society attempted to grapple with the challenges and opportunities of the Industrial Revolution. Voices of the colonized and those with less opportunity tended to be more marginal.

Many of these cultures were not experiencing the full brunt of the Industrial Revolution as such. For example, Canada does not have an especially strong tradition of Scientific Romances because it was, for most of the country through most of the 19th century, a wilderness colonial hinterland sparsely populated with farmers, trappers, and indigenous peoples. The colonized were also less likely to be writing, especially in English, especially in a genre that required a reasonable amount of technological, scientific, and cultural knowledge. An average indigenous person in a colonized nation would be unlikely, through no fault of their own, to have the same resources and opportunities available to them as a Jules Verne would, who could access information about the entire world through the library in Amiens.      

But some people are not average. The short story Sultana's Dream has a unique place in the canon of the genre, as a Scientific Romance written by a Bengali Muslim woman. Published in 1905, feminist and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain used the medium of Scientific Romance to postulate a reversal of fortune for women in her society, turning the tables on the men and hypothesizing a female-run utopia.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland

A group of explorers - all men - venture into the trackless expanse of jungle in search of a hidden mystery. Testing brawn and brain, they pursue the unknown for sport and for glory, bringing rifles and guile to bear for queen, country, science, and reputation. What they find suspends all laws of nature, but will nonetheless be laid low by man. By the last chapter, the forge of adventure has hardened them into true credits to their gender, and a prize is brought back along with them to prove their mettle to the softer, more civilized men back home.

It's a familiar plotline in Victorian-Edwardian fiction. The archetype is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, the 1912 adventure in which a quartet including two brainy scientists, a "great white hunter," and a young newspaperman out to prove himself discover a plateau in South America teeming with dinosaurs. Conan Doyle's lost world and great white hunters were preceded by King Solomon's Mines, the 1885 novel by Sir H. Rider Haggard that arguably originated the genre. It had antecedents in novels by the likes of Jules Verne, but no sooner had the lost world genre been invented than it already found its critics. Rudyard Kipling brought it down a notch in the 1888 short story The Man Who Would be King, which cautioned against British hubris. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman took this genre, and with her womanly perspective, used it as the prompt for a tale of feminist utopia entitled Herland. In her version, published in 1915, the dauntless male explorers find something very daunting indeed... Not fathomless riches or dinosaurs, but a society comprised completely of women, utterly and completely devoid of men and any vestige of patriarchal values.   

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887

After Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, journalist Edward Bellamy's speculative novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 was the third best-selling novel of the 19th century. Published in 1888, this utopian tale created an unheard of sensation in socio-political circles. Marxist writers and labour unions mentioned the book by name as picturing an ideal society. Within ten years, over 165 "Bellamy Clubs" had formed in the United States to propagate the book's ideas, but they were all defunct by the end of the century. Bellamy's utopian vision resonated with a troubled late Victorian society struggling with the transformations of the Industrial Age. Written as a "future history", it provided a hopeful vision that the vexing problems of how to balance industry with humanity had been solved, were solvable. There has been nothing quite like Looking Backward before or since in the annals of Science Fiction writing.   

The main issue addressed in Looking Backward is the question of labour. Late Victorian society in the United States was rapidly succumbing to the ills of unregulated industrial capitalism. From 1873 to 1896, the US and Europe dealt with what they then called the "Great Depression" (losing that title to an even greater one in 1929). Known now as the "Long Depression", it was touched off by a financial crisis in 1873 that lead to the bankruptcy of 18,000 businesses, hundreds of banks, and ten US states, as well as the closure of 89 railroads. This depression was exacerbated by further recessions in the 1880's, the consolidation of major industries in monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts, and the development of unionization and growing labour unrest. 1886 saw the Haymarket affair, in which a labour demonstration escalated - through an anarchist agitator throwing a stick of dynamite - into a full-blown riot claiming the lives of four civilians and seven policemen, and injuring scores of others. The cause of labour has essentially been cast aside by the modern "progressive" Left, but it was perhaps the dominant socio-political concern of the late 19th century.

Bioshock Infinite, New Religious Movements and Utopian Communities

It is sometimes joked that the United States has never met a heresy that it didn't like. Constitutional barriers to the establishment of religion and the frontier mentality of American settlement fermented a petri dish of new religious movements throughout the Nineteenth century, many of which translated into would-be utopian communities. These communities were not strictly religious either, with many established on secular political, economic and philosophical ideals. All of them failed in one way or another, whether they fractured from within or could not sustain themselves in conflict with the laws of the nation. Both of these trends are reflected in Bioshock Infinite's flying utopian city of Columbia and its cult-like leader Zachary Hale Comstock.

Father Comstock sees a vision of a floating city, a new Eden.

When the Nineteenth century began, Christianity in the United States was in the early stages of what would be called the "Second Great Awakening." This movement was expressly evangelistic, restorationist and personalistic, eschewing the established denominations for forms of religion that emphasized personal conversion, charismatic leaders, heightened emotionalism, and counter-culture radicalism, while dispensing with what they perceived as accumulated traditions, and expressed through ad hoc associations like "cults," camp meetings and tent revivals. Their success can be attributed in many respects to what was later described in Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis": an ethos of individualism and self-reliance that was responsive to the demands of frontier settlement, with a mistrust of the established, systemic authority of governments, aristocracies, the arts, churches and academics (including scientists and formal theologians). The more spread out Americans got, the more they looked for solutions that fit their particular contexts and values. Some might argue that we still see echoes of these tendencies in the American zeitgeist.