At my journey writing seminars I usually inform the scholars that they don’t have to go to the ends of the Earth to make a discovery. Actual treasures are sometimes inside straightforward attain, so as a substitute of staring up on the sky in quest of them, look down on the grass (or on the snow) underneath your toes. However look correctly!

A few of you, my pricey readers, would possibly take the above passage as a lame excuse for a drained traveller’s routine start-of-the-year laziness, when it’s so tempting to remain in a heat and cosy home slightly than enterprise to some darkish and frozen far-away fields. And it’s possible you’ll be proper! Persevering with my quest for Britain’s technological, literary, and different Utopias, I wish to introduce you to the one which originated – actually – on our doorstep, simply a few miles away from the IET’s (and E&T’s) state-of-the artwork Stevenage headquarters, now often known as Futures Place.

I’m speaking about certainly one of my favorite books, ‘The Coming Race’, first revealed in 1870 and regarded by many as Britain’s first ever science-fiction novel, and its writer, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1804-1873). The nineteenth century’s most prolific and well-known novelist – much more well-known (at the moment) than his buddy Charles Dickens – he lived within the palatial Knebworth Home, lower than three miles south of Stevenage, and is now most remembered for the worst ever opening sentence of his different novel ‘Paul Clifford’: ‘It was a darkish and stormy night time…’

One other unintended invention of Bulwer-Lytton was Bovril – a preferred (in Britain) thick and salty meat extract, used extensively by sportsmen and explorers to maintain their spirits up. To be extra exact, it was not the extract itself that Bulwer-Lytton had inadvertently invented however its identify, stemming from ‘Vril’ – a fictitious power type from ‘The Coming Race’, his most profitable novel and, to my thoughts, the most effective literary Utopia to ever come out of Britain after the unique Thomas Extra one.

The e-book, to which Bulwer-Lytton, a profitable politician and an MP, himself referred as “satirical Utopia”, is written in a disarmingly easy and surprisingly trendy language and is all however unputdownable. It’s the story of two explorers – certainly one of them a mining engineer, who perishes by accident originally of their journey – discovering an underground Utopian land, populated by a superior winged race. The Vril-ya individuals are propelled by the magic power (‘Vril’), primarily based on the then newly found pressure of electromagnetism, that feeds their wings and makes them fly. The wings themselves represent a technological innovation: a private Vril-powered jetpack of kinds.

First revealed in 1871, ‘The Coming Race’ attracts upon Darwinist concepts of the longer term, dominated by girls and characterised by technological progress. It was nearly actually impressed by the author’s go to to New Lanark – Robert Owen’s Utopian industrial neighborhood in southern Scotland. However whereas Owen noticed know-how as the principle device of human liberation, Bulwer-Lytton believed within the energy of the collective character and the main position of ethical qualities in social transformation.

Right here’s a typical description of “some nice manufacturing facility” within the Utopian underground world: “There was an enormous engine within the wall which was in full play, with wheels and cylinders resembling our personal steam-engines, besides that it was richly ornamented with valuable stones and metals, and appeared to emanate a pale phosphorescent environment of shifting mild…”

Whereas studying ‘The Coming Race’, I made a discovery – a small, but important, element, which, to my information, not one of the Bulwer-Lytton biographers had managed to identify – which reveals Bulwer-Lytton’s curiosity in Russian philosophy, significantly within the works of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891). She was a Utopian writer in addition to one of many founders and the main theoretician of theosophy, a social concept primarily based totally on her personal works – a mix of Jap religions with Western occultism. Though there aren’t any official data of Blavatsky ever visiting Knebworth, I’ve little doubt that she did. Having spent most of her life in London, she couldn’t have prevented Bulwer-Lytton, whom she herself calls “certainly one of our personal” in a letter.

Bulwer-Lytton should have had a tough time looking for a reputation for that magic elixir of life – the very base of his Utopia that propelled his angelic winged creatures. When describing the plot to Blavatsky, he might have requested her: “What’s the Russian for ‘wings’?”, to which she might have answered: “Kril’ya!”

He should have preferred the sound of that phrase and derived the identify of the magic power and the subterranean superior beings from it.
A radical search in different languages reveals that the phrase ‘wings’ appears like ‘kril’ya’ solely in Russian, Ukrainain (‘krila’), Czech and Slovak (‘kridla’), and a number of other different Slavonic languages, of which Russian was by far the most effective recognized and essentially the most accessible (presumably by way of Blavatsky?) to Bulwer-Lytton!

So fashionable was ‘The Coming Race’ that the phrase ‘vril’ later developed into a preferred British trademark – Bovril.

In March 1891, a particular occasion was held on the Royal Albert Corridor in London to rejoice ‘The Coming Race’. The three-day extravaganza was known as ‘The Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete’. Though its foremost goal was elevating funds for the West Finish Hospital and the London Faculty for Therapeutic massage and Electrical energy, it went down in historical past because the world’s first science-fiction convention.

The entertainments on the occasion included magic reveals, a fortune-telling canine and ‘scientific’ discussions of the magical powers of Vril and the Vril’ya. It was most likely for the higher that the often-unconscious makes an attempt to recreate Bulwer-Lytton’s Utopia in actuality have been restricted to the ‘Vril’Ya Bazaar’ and haven’t spilled out into the streets of Britain’s cities and cities, like they did in another nations.
 ‘Ignore the individuals’s ethical qualities at your peril!’

Such was the warning that ‘The Coming Race’ – the mom of all post-​Thomas-Extra British literary Utopias – prophetically gave to the longer term Soviet and later Russian social experiments. As demonstrated but once more by the brutal fratricidal conflict Russia has unleashed in opposition to Ukraine, that warning – tragically – has fallen on deaf ears.