Still working my way through Circle of Days by Ken Follett, where he does for Stonehenge what he did for medieval cathedrals in Pillar of the Earth. It’s a quick read, or would be, if I wasn’t so busy with work and other stuff.
In my bedside reading, I finished The Coming Race (later retitled Vril-ya: The Power of the Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who used to be known as the author of The Last Days on Pompeii, then became better known as the guy who started a novel “It was a dark and stormy night”, and this got a contest named after him). I’d wanted to read it for a long time, but hadn’t found a copy. This is what Kindle is great for – I’ve read lots of things I’ve looked for on it because I could find them, cheap.
The Coming Race is supposed to be the very first “lost race” novel, where the hero finds an entire city or civilization that has been isolated and either is a perfectly preserved ancient world or they hold great scientific or magical secrets. There might, for all I know, be an earlier example, but this was the first big, famous one. The notion was endlessly copied in Victorian and later in pulp literature. H.R. Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs shamelessly wrote novel after novel filled with such capsule universes, and there are oodles of other examples.
In Bulwer-Lytton’s novel the hero and a companion , learning of something strange in a deep mine shaft, go to investigate. There is a cave-in, the companion is killed, and the protagonist finds himself injured and being pursued by a giant reptile, possibly a dinosaur (not the first appearance of this trope – Jules Verne beat him to the punch by putting prehistoric reptiles – not dinosaurs, though – in a Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, seven years earlier). He is rescued by the Vril-ya, a civilization that lives underground and controls the power of vril. Bulwer-Lytton reportedly wanted this to be something like electricity, but which could do far more, and more amazing things. If he’d written a quarter of a century later it would’ve been radioactivity. In many ways, vril comes off like The Force in the Star Wars universe. It can prolong life. It heals, It lets manipulators fly. They can control it to reduce enemies (and unwanted dinosaurs) to heaps of ash. Probably more important in an underground world, it can provide light.
Using Vril, they created a utopian world where everyone has all that they need. Women are not only equal, they’re superior to the men in many ways – bigger and stronger and usually smarter. But their civilization is necessarily pretty static – if you’ve got everything you want or need, why change anything? Lacking sources of contention or frustration, they don’t appreciate or need drama or comedy . There is a little creation of new devices, but not a lot. Our hero finds himself more than a little out of place. The vril-ya have read his mind while they cured him (there is NOTHING vril can’t do) and know about our civilization’s continual strife and creation of weapons of war, and don’t want him infecting them or going back and telling everyone about their world. He can;t blend into society and can’t have romantic entanglements with the vril-ya. He is almost executed by a child – burned to ash like the reptile – but is rescued at the last minute by a female whose interest seems more maternal than romantic. She drills a hole to a mine (using vril, of course) and lets him go back up.
The possibilities of Vril supposedly excited the Victorian era, but I can’;t fimnd evidence for the vril clubs I’ve heard about. The chief resu;lts of this appear to be that Helen Blavatsky liked the idea so much that she incorporated Vril into her Theosophic history of the world, and a manufacturer of nutritional supplements named his Beef Tea “Bovril” by combining ”bov-” from “bovine” with “vril”. I’ sure British Dopers are familiar with this – it’s still sold in a characteristically-shaped jar – but we only have it in America in specialty shops. You can read about the influence of “vril” in the Wikipedia article on it.
One big effect was that the idea of a superscientific force like “Vril” and a superscietific lost race sort of got combined and affected our view of Atlantis, which, until then had simply been thought of as a typical or slightly advanced Bronze-age culture in popular thought. After this it became something very different. See my essay and webpage on Atlantis – Atlantis — The Lost Continent – The Writings of Stephen R. Wilk