San Antonio College Library

A satiric fantasy predicting the shape of things to come.

Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902) was a Victorian novelist who wrote in many genres. The Way of All Flesh and Erewhon are his most famous novels. Besides fiction Butler also wrote on evolution, Christian orthodoxy, Italian art, literary history and translated the Illiad and The Odyssey. Erewhon is a utopian satire of Victorian England published in 1872. The title is the name of a fictional country and it is also the word nowhere spelled backwards. The beginning...

Eleanor Darcy has married a university chancellor whom the prime minister listens to. With her husband now in jail two journalists interview her.

"It is a world in which near-instantaneous travel from continent to continent is free to all. In which automation now provides for everybody's basic needs. In which nobody living can remember an actual war. In which it is illegal for three or more people to gather for the practice of religion--but ecumenical "sensayers" minister in private, one-on-one. In which gendered language is archaic, and to dress as strongly male or female is, if not exactly...

"From Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth to Rudy Rucker's The Hollow Earth, subterranean worlds have been a source of both fascination and fear for the literary imagination, and The Coming Race is no exception. An evolutionary fantasy first published in 1871, the story draws upon ideas of Darwinism to describe a near-future world characterized by female dominance, physical perfection, and vast technological progress. The novel was extremely...

The Altrurian Romances (1968) of William Dean Howells consists of three utopias. A traveller from Altruria (1894), "The Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1893-94), and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907). The Altrurian traveller, Aristed Homos, visits the United States in 1892 and stays there for about a year and a half, visiting a New Hampshire mountain resort hotel, New York City and Chicago. These romances record Homos's criticism of the social,...

Set during the early 1890s in a fashionable summer resort somewhere on the East Coast of the United States, the book is narrated by a Mr Twelvemough, a popular author of light fiction who has been selected to function as host to a visitor from the faraway island of Altruria called Mr Homos. Homos has come all the way to the United States to experience first-hand everyday life in the country which prides itself to represent democracy and equality,...

The lathe of heaven: In a world beset by climate instability and overpopulation, George Orr discovers that his dreams have the power to alter reality. Upon waking, the world he knew has become a strange, barely recognizable place, where only George has the clear memory of how it was before. He seeks counseling from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately understands how powerful a weapon George wields. Soon, George is a pawn in Haber's dangerous...