The Coming Race

Space and Time are pleased to bring you The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer Lytton. This classic is presented as a wonderfully presented edition with a fully interactive table of contents.

Vril, the Power of the Coming Race is an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, originally printed as The Coming Race. Among its readers have been those who have believed that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called "Vril" is accurate, to the extent that some theosophists, notably Helena Blavatsky, William Scott-Elliot, and Rudolf Steiner, accepted the book as truth. A popular book, The Morning of the Magicians (1960) suggested that a secret Vril Society existed in pre-Nazi Berlin. However, there is no historical evidence for the existence of such a society.

The Coming Race was originally published anonymously in late 1871 but Bulwer-Lytton was known to be the author. Samuel Butler's Erewhon was also published anonymously, in March 1872, and Butler suspected that its initial success was due to it being taken by many as a sequel by Bulwer-Lytton to The Coming Race. When it was revealed in the 25 May 1872 edition of the Athenaeum that Butler was the author, sales dropped by 90 percent because he was unknown at the time.