Erewhon
Samuel Butler's Erewhon, or Over the Range was published anonymously 1872. In this satire of Victorian society, the main character Higgs discovers an unknown country, the seeming utopia called Erewhon, Nowhere backwards with the "h" and "w" transposed. The starting chapters detailing the discovery of Erewhon were based on Butler's experiences in New Zealand as a young man. Butler was possibly the first to write about the idea that machines might one day develop consciousness through the process of Darwinian Selection.
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- I highly recommend Erewhon by Samuel Butler. The author is the namesake for Butlerian Jihad. Interesting book in our times.
- You know, I apologize a bit, because I'm not even sure this answers any of your questions... But you should read Erewhon by Samuel Butler.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
It was written way back when, but there is even a short section that deals with, ironically, animal rights, that then progresses to plant rights, and does some extrapolating on outcomes when these tendencies are scaled to the extreme, while being set in an environment that, for the time, takes some really scathing shots at the mores of the day which I can't honestly say haven't resurged back into relevance in my lifetime.
I don't generally like just telling people to go read things, (nowadays it can feel like giving someone a "free puppy"). But something tells me it may speak to you, if you're willing to embark on the journey.
- This became a chapter in his book Erewhon, which I read recently and enjoyed:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon
It and a couple of related essays are combined to become The Book of the Machines segment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon#The_Book_of_the_Machin...
- An interesting read about the subject is the small 'utopian' book Erewhon by Samuel Butler, published in 1872. It considers the implications of the industrial revolution on society, and thus how it shapes the industrial society and its future. The relationship with the religious power structure is quite enlightening.
- For what it's worth, the following three stories/novels have that effect on me. There's something about them that seems surreal and foreign, a little magical.
- The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster
- Erewhon, Samuel Butler
- The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
The styles and formats are completely different. The only common thing I can think of is that there's this invisible guiding force in all of them, whether it's good or bad. The Machine Stops is a dystopia about technology in absence of a soulful humanity. Erewhon is wild. Truly wild. It has to be a genre all its own, something akin to Darwinian technopunk. The Alchemist is probably one of those novels you could riff on with a yoga instructor and have a good conversation :joy:. It's classical magical surrealism, but it's a good story about a person's lifetime journey. Nothing deep, but it's wholesome.
Edit: also will add A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr., and Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
- "Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming from the cellar window and sends his shoots crawling straight thereto: they will crawl along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar window; if there be a little earth anywhere on the journey he will find it and use it for his own ends. What deliberation he may exercise in the matter of his roots when he is planted in the earth is a thing unknown to us, but we can imagine him saying, 'I will have a tuber here and a tuber there, and I will suck whatsoever advantage I can from all my surroundings. This neighbour I will overshadow, and that I will undermine; and what I can do shall be the limit of what I will do. He that is stronger and better placed than I shall overcome me, and him that is weaker I will overcome.'
"The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.
From Samuel Butler's Erewhon. (The same chapter that inspired the eponymous Butlerian Jihad in Dune, incidentally.) I don't agree with the conclusion here, and I doubt Butler did either, but the whole book is a great read.
[1] http://www.online-literature.com/samuel-butler/erewhon/26/
