Episode 35.1 transcription - Samuel Butler - "Erewhon" (1872)

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(Music: Chrononauts main theme) 

introductions

JM:  

Hello everyone, we are back.  

We are Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. You can find us on the web at Chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com where you can find all kinds of stuff that we've done. We can find translations of some works that we've done on the podcast and will be coming up as well as links to all the episodes. We are on YouTube as well and all the regular podcasting platforms, Spotify, Apple Music, Anchor, which is now part of Spotify, I think, as well as Stitcher and Google. You can contact us and leave comments on our blogspot, but also we are available by email at chrononautspodcast.gmail.com and at ChrononautsSF on Twitter.  

I'm J.M. and, of course, as usual, I am here with my co-host, Gretchen and Nate. Hope everyone's doing well.  

Nate:  

Absolutely.   

Gretchen:  

Yes, I've been doing well too.   

Nate:  

Very gorgeous weather tonight in the last couple of days, I have to say. It's been a nice break into spring.  

Gretchen:  

Yes, it has been pretty hot here recently. It's nice to have some spring weather, but it is quite a change from just like a couple weeks ago. It was still snowing and now all of a sudden it's so sunny out.  

Nate:  

It comes on fast for sure.  

JM:  

It's been really crazy though. Last weekend was really hot, got up to 27 Celsius the week before it was snowing. Now it's back down to 10 degrees and it's been showering, so I don't know. It's been really weird. You don't really know what to do from one day to the next, but yeah, that's where we're at right now.  

We're sort of talking before we started recording here about what everybody's been reading and this thought maybe we could go through that a little bit before we start tonight's program. So what's everybody been reading lately? Off podcast.  

Gretchen:  

I've been reading Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night Traveler", which I started a couple days ago now and I've been really enjoying it so far. That's my first Calvino work and I would like to read some more of his after I finish it.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I definitely want to check out some of this stuff. I've heard a lot of great things about him.  

JM:  

That's the only Calvino work I'm familiar with and I really liked it, but I read it close on to 18, 20 years ago now. So I definitely would like to revisit it, but yeah, it's really fun, kind of playful style, but also mixing in a whole lot of stories within stories, which is kind of a funny thing I've been coming up against lately where there's all these interconnected stories an onion of stories where you have to appeal one away and there's another one underneath kind of thing.  

I've been reading the New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson, which is exactly that. It's a whole bunch of interconnected stories, some of which involve the same characters. It's told kind of in the style of 1001 Nights, I guess, sort of, but it's really good though. Really good sort of Victorian adventure, intrigue, mystery, pretty well written, pretty exciting and kind of fast paced and I don't know, I like it a lot so far. I finished up "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison and that was a really spectacular book. Gretchen, I know you said you were recently doing that book in a course, right?  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, we are in the process of reading it. The entire course has been sort of dedicated to the book as well as some of Ellison's nonfiction essays and the like. I am currently, I think I have just one chapter in the epilogue left in my reading, so I'm close to finishing it as well.  

Nate:  

It's cool that they give you the entire course to cover the book and not just cram it in a week or two, so you really get the time to space it out and enjoy it.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, it's really nice. We kind of have a class to talk about one or two chapters and kind of expand on the ideas of each one, which is nice.  

Nate:  

Cool, yeah.   

JM:  

I really found it a powerful experience. It gave me a lot of emotions and things to think about. There were things about it that made me kind of upset, but like I don't mind that necessarily. It was very, very well written and it had a real character to it that I felt pretty captivating. It's quite a long book, so it took me a while to get through it because there were times when I had to take a break after a chapter or something. You know, just like, all right, I need to put this down for a couple of days and come back to it, but it was very rewarding in the end.  

Nate:  

Yeah, that's what I have on my shelf. I'm definitely eager to check that out at some point myself.  

JM:  

Yeah, I think you'll definitely appreciate it.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I've heard nothing but good things about it.  

JM:  

Well, the last thing I wanted to mention that I had read recently was one of our podcast authors, David Lindsay, the writer of "A Voyage to Arcturus", which is a book that Nate, you and I both really liked when we did on the podcast and Gretchen, you recently read it.  

Gretchen:  

Yes.  

JM:  

I think you also enjoyed it a lot, right?  

Gretchen:  

Yes, I did very much.  

JM:  

So I read his third novel, "Sphinx", and this was from 1922. And I think I mentioned this on the podcast when we were doing the episode. But the other book that I had read by him at that time was "The Haunted Woman", and that is definitely much more of a conventional Edwardian narrative in a sense, although it has a lot of strange elements to it. And it ends up being a supernatural tragedy. "Sphinx" was very much in the same vein. It's a whole bunch of people staying in a house and in a community somewhere in rural England. And there are pretty well to do. One of them is a composer, though, and she's kind of having a frustrating time of things, trying to realize her ambitions, but make enough money to stay afloat. And she has kind of a lifestyle where she drinks a lot and does a lot of drugs and hangs out with people. And she's kind of like the main character or the sort of a point of view character has gone to this place to work. And he's invented a device that can record people's unconscious mental impulses, essentially dreams. And it's basically about how he's staying with this family and the neighbors of the family come and go. There's a lot of fighting against convention and essentially the kind of situation that I noticed in "Haunted Woman" where it seemed like the characters were really struggling against expectations and societal norms. And especially women really wanting to break away from them and not really able to achieve their goals and desires. And most of the characters in the book besides the point of view character are all women.  

And he does a really good job of actually writing everything and conveying, I guess, the passions and intensity of feeling that you kind of get a little bit of that in our tourists, even though the setting is very strange and everything. Just the way he describes emotions and intense feelings and stuff. It's all there in the book and I was really enjoying it. I sometimes have to laugh at the stuffiness of the setting and everything. You know, you got these neighbors who are nosy and people all worried about reputations and they're passing notes back and forth to each other instead of talking. And like, then they're not allowed to see this person and not allowed to see that person. And it's kind of funny, but at the same time, it's like, you could tell that that's kind of, it's supposed to infuriate you because it infuriates some of the characters too, right?  

I was going to give it I was going to say, okay, maybe like four stars on Goodreads, maybe like edging towards three. But then the last chapter came along and the last chapter is like this monumentally powerful, tragic thing in the vein of the ending of "Arcturus". And it almost bumps it up to five stars for me. It's that that last chapter actually had me like sweating and clenching my fists. I didn't think like, I didn't know he was going to go there necessarily. And he did. And I'm just like, everything just came together in this really tragic way that was both a bummer, but really satisfying.  

So I don't know. Yeah, I had a great time with that book. It's the kind of thing where I probably wouldn't have even read it if I didn't know it was by the author of "Arcturus", because like you describe it to somebody, it's like a bunch of stuffy English people hanging out in Edwardian drawing rooms. Like, I don't know, it doesn't necessarily sound appealing, but it really, really works. So yeah.  

Nate:  

Cool.  

JM:  

What about you Nate?  

Nate:  

Yeah, I've been also doing a bunch of stories that are kind of interconnected. I had to check my Goodreads to see exactly what I started since the last time.  

But I reread the Snopes trilogy by William Faulkner. The first time I read it, I wasn't sure whether I liked the first one or the third one the best. I think doing it this time, the first one definitely stands out a little bit more, but there's some really outstanding stuff in the third one as well. The second one does dip a little bit, but yeah, the first one has some really incredible mixtures of his disturbing Southern Gothic scenes as well as his more strange comic scenes. So I really like those three books overall, and they come together really well. And like with everything else Faulkner wrote pretty much, it ties into his fictional Mississippi County. So I was checking the digital Yoknapatawpha  website, which kind of maps out all the characters throughout the novels and what they do. And a lot of the descriptions from novel to novel are inconsistent, which is kind of a nice touch, but also kind of frustrating at the same time because you read something in one novel and there's a description of it in another. And it's like, wait a minute, did it really happen like that? Are these dates a little bit off? And I don't know, it's just been kind of one quirk of the universe.  

But both the narrators, "The Hamlet", the first novel was narrated by a different guy than the second two. And they do a pretty good job, but I think the first one was better. But the book I read after that was a reread of Lawrence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman". And the narrator on this one is Anton Lesser, who you might know from Game of Thrones or the various BBC costume dramas. He's been in a bunch of Dickens stuff and others, but he does an absolutely incredible reading of this. And it's one of those works that's especially difficult to read, I think, because there's so much, I guess, like visual jokes in the text of formatting and plays with the censorship and stuff like that. But the audio production on the audiobook is just absolutely fantastic, both reading aside how they do sound effects to incorporate things. It's just a fantastic production.  

JM:  

That's really cool. What kind of formatting? That's pretty unusual for our 18th century.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right. So there is a classic scene at the beginning where he's describing the town parson, and the town parson's name is Yorick. And he has a lineage dating back 800 years of all the people named Yorick who originates from Shakespeare's Yorick from "Hamlet". And it's a kind of fun absurd plot, but this Yorick pisses everybody off in the town and basically gets murdered by a mob. And after his death, it says the classic line of "Alas, poor Yorick!" And then the entire page is black. Like just black ink the entire square. It's such a cool moment in text and it comes up right at the very beginning. So it's not really much of a spoiler as far as the plot goes. I mean, if you can spoil the plot in this anyway, there basically is no plot. It's just really nonlinear, surrealistic, absurdist comedy that weaves in these picaresques tropes and narratives. But in the strangest way, I mean, the running joke throughout the entire novel is it's supposed to be an autobiography of Tristam Shandy, but he can't get to the point at all. He's not even born until the third volume. And I think there's like maybe one or two incidents he relates past his childhood. The vast majority of the novel is him spending time talking about his uncle and his strange adventures.  

JM:  

Anything but himself.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right. It's an incredible book and it's really weird and it's like really laugh out loud funny and Lesser does just an incredible job with the reading.  

JM:  

I really want to read that now.  

Nate:  

Yeah, definitely check it out. But yeah, just before this recording, I also finished up Joyce's "Dubliners", which is his first collection of short stories. It's early Joyce, so I don't think it's as great as "Ulysses" or "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", but it definitely has some pretty cool stories in it. Definitely some flashes of his later greatness, even though some of the stories are a bit uneven.  

JM:  

Cool. Gretchen, I kind of, I don't know, I don't think I really cut you off, but I just sort of started talking about a bunch of stuff. Was there any other ones that you wanted to mention?  

Gretchen:  

Oh, yeah. Well, the book that I read right before "If On a Winters Night" was "Our Spoons Came from Woolworths" by Barbara Comyns, who I've also read, she wrote this book called "The Vet's Daughter", and both of them came from the New York Review Books editions. And it kind of reminded me, it's a very, it's quite a dark tale. It's like this woman who just goes through a lot of hardships throughout her life as sort of a poor woman that her husband doesn't do any work. And she kind of is running the household because her husband is just sort of lazy and doesn't want to. But it's got this sort of grim sense of humor at times. And I was thinking a bit as I was reading it, it does sort of have a Carrington-esque sort of sense of humor at points where I feel like they both have a similar style. Sort of kind of even has like a fairy tale-esque feeling to it, which is the case with "A Vet's Daughter" as well. Yeah, it was a really, it was a really interesting book.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I like that style a lot.  

JM:  

I came across her name recently on a page that somebody had done of like unusual weird books. Like there wasn't really much of a qualifier for that besides that was what they thought they were, right? Like this just them putting together a list of the books they found delightfully weird, I guess. And there was a good cross-section of stuff like a lot of it I hadn't heard of and a lot of it was newer books, which is cool because I sometimes don't really find out too much about what's coming out nowadays. But there were some older ones there as well that looked really interesting. And there was one of her books, it wasn't that one, it was called "Those That Are Changed and Those That Are Dead" or something like that. It looked pretty interesting.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, I have heard of that work as well, although I don't know too much about that one.  

JM:  

Yet another thing for me to get into at some point.  

Nate:  

Yeah, the list never ends.  

Gretchen:  

Yes.  

(music: mechanical noises like an automated factory)  

historical background on computing and calculating machines, plus artificial intelligence  

Nate:  

So I guess tonight we're going to be looking at another set of stories where, again, the list never ends. We could be doing an entire podcast on just this one theme. But I think for tonight and next month, as this is the first of a two-part series we're going to be doing, we're going to be taking a look at machines, mechanical and artificial intelligence, and of course, robots. We previously explored this theme in our Automata-themed episode way back when, but that episode focused mostly on earlier stories and involved things like strange wind-up devices, elaborate tools, clockwork, steam-based hydraulics, and things like that.  

JM:  

We still got some of those today.  

Nate:  

Oh yeah, we will get some of those stories today, but I think this set of stories kind of pushes the concept a little bit further. Perhaps one exception is one story we did during that episode, "The Future Eve", which revolves around the creation of an android. And it's certainly one of the earliest novels to feature what is essentially a modern conception of an android. So if you're interested in these kind of stories, we recommend you also check out the segment on that novel there, as we might reference it a handful of times tonight.  

Tonight and next month, we'll be covering a series of stories which span the late 1850s to the late 1920s. And throughout the time, the sophistication of machines, in particular calculating and computing machines, vastly increases at a rapid pace. After the 1920s, and especially after World War II, the pace of sophistication exponentially grows to the present day, where we have several very sophisticated AI tools currently in popular use. Text generation via ChatGPT, artwork generation via Мidjourney and Stable Diffusion, OpenAI transcription software, among various other tools that are floating around. While a lot of the major developments in practical artificial intelligence and robotic technology happen in the latter half of the 20th century, these developments can be seen as the convergence of a number of important factors and trends would start to form as early as the ancient world.  

Certainly the ideas of mechanical intelligence and robots have played a major part throughout mainstream 20th century science fiction.  

So before we get into our first story tonight, let's briefly take a look at the history of machines, automation, and particularly calculating and computing machines, as computers are what we rightly associate with artificial intelligence today, and have for some time. While one of our authors tonight muses on the nature of machines and how one can be as simple as something to extend one's arm, a concept which has come up before on the podcast. For this segment, we'll define calculating machines as those capable of processing mathematical operations and computing machines as machines which can not only perform calculating functions, but perform calculating functions in complex series as defined by some kind of algorithm, of which the storage and retrieval of information is an important piece.  

So calculating machines have been with humanity more or less as long as there has been writing. The abacus was used by the ancient Sumerians sometime around 2500 BC. Their numeral system was a base 60 system with no zero, a numerical system which has several significances to it. First off, it's a very mathematically convenient number being divisible by a great deal of numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, 10, 12, and 15. The second reason is also a possible religious significance, though nothing concrete has been demonstrated about this. Two of their sky gods represented by Jupiter and Saturn take 12 and 30 years respectively to make their way across the heavens, 60 having factors of both. So whether the ancient Sumerians were able to track the movements of Jupiter and Saturn is, I think, beyond the scope of current knowledge, but it's at least an interesting coincidence if there's not anything there. The cuneiform form writing system is, I think, really fascinating and it's pretty cool how they represent numerals, so definitely check out some of the links in the description if you're interested in this sort of thing.  

But the abacus and calculating devices, like the counting board as described by the Salamis tablet, were used everywhere in the empires of the ancient world, the Babylonians, the Chinese, the Greeks, and the Romans. And unfortunately a great deal less about the ancient worlds calculating and computing is known than we would like, and there's certainly a lot of puzzles in there. The biggest of which is probably the Antikythera mechanism, which was constructed sometime in the 2nd century BC and only discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean in the Mediterranean. For the time, it's an almost anachronistically complex astronomical calculator, as it only survives in pieces we can only speculate on the full design, but several people have proposed certain reconstruction models.  

However, with a lot of technologies, there's a pretty big gap between the ancient world and the Enlightenment, so we'll skip forward about 1700 years to the early 1600s. In 1617, John Napier, a Scottish mathematician, published his book, "Rhabdology", which describes the use of mechanical rods referred to as "Napier's bones" and allowed for the calculation of multiplication tables. This would form the basis for the slide rule, which was developed later throughout the 17th century and used up until pocket electronic calculators came into standard use in the 1970s.  

With a slide rule, you could calculate a number of advanced functions, such as a logarithms, square roots, trig, and exponents. Also in the 1600s, Blaise Pascal invented a mechanical calculator in 1642, impressively at the age of 18, which could automatically add and subtract numbers, and since several still survive, we know exactly how they worked. The calculator was an eight-piece adding machine, roughly the size of a shoebox that could be carried under one's arm.  

Inspired by this design, Gottfried Leibniz began work on a calculator in 1672 and worked on it until 1694 when he produced a device which could do all four arithmetic operations using a step-drawn mechanism. Only one survives and not in working condition, but it served as the basis for the more widely produced Hahn machine, which was introduced in 1774, which a great deal survived, and you can see one at the Deutsche Museum among other places.  

So, shifting gears, if you pardon the pun, away from calculating machines, and towards information storage and retrieval, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a loom in 1804-1805 based on a much more primitive design from 1745, developed by Jacques Vaucanson. The Jacquard loom used punch cards to control the loom's actions and automate the weaving of incredibly intricate patterns, and the use of punch cards would influence the designs of Charles Babbage, possibly the most interesting figure we'll mention in this segment, though not necessarily one that one is able to draw a straight line from to modern computing.  

So, Babbage was an English mathematician who in the 1820s developed a series of prototype machines called the Difference Engines, which were mechanical calculators, but much more complex than anything that had previously come before. The intended initial use was the calculation of navigation tables to a very precise degree, though Babbage immediately realized other uses, such as the solving of equations and the computations of other types of mathematical tables. It was composed of a series of incredibly complex wheels and gears. He had a working prototype in 1822, which he used to leverage a proposal for a larger, more important project, which was the analytical engine, which resembled more of a modern computer than a calculator. It could read and store data through a punch card system, it had a form of internal memory, and capabilities for processing logical commands and algorithms.  

In 1833, Augusta Ada Byron, who would later become the Countess of Lovelace, attended one of Babbage's parties, which he liked to throw every Saturday, and were most sought after. She was the daughter of Lord Byron, and the two, that is Ada and Babbage, were greatly impressed with one another, and they formed a friendship and working relationship. She translated some of Babbage's work, as well as translating European works into English, and most importantly, annotated her translations.  

JM:  

Probably knew Mary Shelley, too.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right.  

Her annotation of the translation of Luigi Menabrea includes an algorithmic solution for calculating Bernoulli numbers using the analytic engine. One of the first earliest descriptions of something that can be called a computer program, with many sources saying it is outright the first. The quibble here is whether or not what she wrote was a computer program or not, and it's possibly a fair quibble as the main problem was the analytic engine was never built.  

It was far too complex and expensive to actually be constructed, even though the mathematics and theory behind it were correct. And as such, the project never really went anywhere, and eventually fell into obscurity.  

 JM:  

 Yeah, that's fairly unfortunate.  

Nate:  

 It is.  

 JM:  

Imagine if it had actually come to pass.  

Nate:  

Yeah, it would be absolutely enormous. And I don't know what kind of power source would be to drive it. His early difference engines were like wind-up hand crank things, but that would be just impractical to run on something this size. So he would need some kind of steam power because at the time.  

JM:  

Yeah, you have a bunch of guys running up and down ladders pouring coal into steam shoots. To power the computing machine. Now that's a steampunk image if I've ever heard one.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right, exactly. And I think there actually have been a steampunk novel about Babbage and Lovelace doing just that.  

JM:  

"The Difference Engine".  

Nate:  

Yeah, right.  

But it did influence important figures like Karl Marx and Mark Twain. But one person it did not influence was Herman Hollerith, who we will get into in just a minute. But before that, our next step is Boole's seminal textbooks, "The Mathematical Analysis of Logic" from 1847, and "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which Founded the Mathematical Theories of LLogic and Probabilities" from 1854, which both provided a mathematical framework for an algebra known as Boolean algebra that would later find itself as the basis of digital computing. And that it expresses values as true or false or zero or one.  

So Herman Hollerith was the major figure that I think really gets modern computing going. And he, at the age of 19, graduated from the Columbia School of Mines in 1879 and was employed by the U.S. Census to work on the 1880 census. Part of his role here was to study the operation of the census and to automate it where possible. So he ponders on this question for a few years and in 1884 leaves the government and starts his own business, shortly afterwards filing a patent application for the system he's developed, so pretty good business sense.  

His machine, not inspired by Babbage, as by all accounts he was unaware of Babbage's work, but rather directly inspired by the same person who inspired Babbage, that is Jacquard and his loom, Hollerith's system revolved around a series of punch tape to store information, but his patent was broad enough that it covered punch cards as well, and by 1886 he had developed a working prototype of a tabulation machine that he was able to demonstrate, which he did by processing various records and statistics of the deceased in Baltimore for the Department of Health.  

By 1889 he had three related patents and of course selected by the government to conduct the tabulation of the 1890 census, so he made a great deal of money here basically using the government's own research to sell it back to them. It also found commercial use in processing records for railroads, and unfortunately for him, the government felt that Hollerith was price gouging them, so while he was paid well for the 1890 and 1900 censuses, the government developed its own census tabulation machines for 1910.  

Hollerith sued the government for patent infringement, but the case was dropped, and in light of such he saw and offered to sell the company, which he did in 1911. The Hollerith patents merged with three other companies to form the company Computing Tabulation Recording Company, or CTR, and in 1924 CTR changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation, better known today as IBM.  

The Jacquard Loom was certainly an interesting use of punch cards, but there is no doubt that Hollerith system, which was widely adopted across a lot of industries, was incredibly influential on the design of later punch card machines and how data is stored and retrieved from them. What we think of today is a digital computer, and the Babbage Machines were an early example of that, but it's important to note the role that analog computers played in the development.  

We discussed a slide rule earlier, which is an early example of a primitive analog computer, but it has its limits as to the complexity of problems it can calculate. Differential equations, for one, pose a particular challenge and have some important practical applications such as ballistic trajectory calculations and predicting the rising and falling of tides. Early attempts at solving these problems were made by various people, one of the more notable being William Thompson, better known today as Lord Kelvin, who examined this problem in the 1860s and 1870s.  

A working mechanical analog solution to this arrived in 1930 with Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, which were used in World War II. One interesting use of them is the United States Army tracked the trajectory of German V-2 rockets, and reverse engineered their course using the calculations to locate the facility where the rockets were being launched from, and then used that to attack the facility.  

Bush's development of the differential analyzer falls right after the last story we'll be covering in this block of episodes, which we'll be getting to next month. But from this point on, all the groundwork for modern computing has more or less been set, so we'll just briefly run through developments that bring this to the present day, but consider everything from this point forward as science fiction from the viewpoint of our authors tonight and next month.  

One of the first electronic digital computers was the ENIAC, developed during World War II and completed in 1946, and was also used to solve differential equations. The difference here is the ENIAC represents information digitally that is using a series of zeros and ones, like the Babbage apparatus, though this time it's electronic, that is, it uses vacuum tubes to represent the digital state, unlike the system of gears that the Babbage machine did. Modern computers basically function in the same way, replacing the vacuum tubes of the ENIAC with transistors, but the idea is more or less the same.  

These and new rapid developments in computing, combined with Norbert Wiener's absolutely groundbreaking text, "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" from 1948, were two of the factors in leading to the formation of academic research into artificial intelligence in the 1950s. Computing power at the time wasn't capable of producing functional neural networks until the 1980s and 1990s, when the field really takes off and increases in scale exponentially to the present.  

So that's where we are now, but maybe the most important question is, where will we be in 15, 25, or 30 years? It seems to me that it might be actually happening. I used to think that Kurzweil's projections for a 2035, 2045 computer consciousness event was unrealistically soon, but I'm really not so sure anymore with the rapid progression of AI technologies.  

I was listening to a talk somewhere on the internet and somebody was saying, look at how sophisticated these tools are now, but just think of what the next generation of tools is going to look like.  

JM:  

It just brings up something that science fiction writers have been pondering for a long time, including some of our authors today. Well, one of them specifically. Where does consciousness actually begin though? We can't really determine that, and that's actually one of the oddest things about this whole scenario. We can't actually tell when it starts. So it's like the idea of the Turing test was that if you can't tell as a human being, then does it really matter? Which is kind of a simplistic, I guess, a simplistic way of, I mean, I think we have there's more complicated factors involved, but it's still an interesting philosophical question.  

Nate:  

Absolutely. No, I mean, it's been a staple of science fiction for why I guess we'll see tonight in roughly 150 years. I mean, it's debatable how much fiction "The Book of the Machines" is. I mean, we'll get to that when we get to that, but certainly throughout the entire course of the 20th century, this idea of robots and machine consciousness and the ethics behind that have been a theme in the genre. So it's kind of interesting as this technology starts to become science reality, not science fiction.  

So as we discuss our next work, which will be Samuel Butler's Erewhon, I want you all to keep this stuff in the back of your minds as I think we'll be getting into a more in-depth discussion of how this relates together at the end of that story.  

(music: Samuel Butler's "Ulysses" played on piano and sung by a robotic sounding vocoder)  

Samuel Butler background/biography  

Nate:  

So our first author tonight has a lot of issues, and he is quite the conflicted person. And he's also the kind of person who is quite eager to tell the reader all about it. And that person is Samuel Butler, who today is most known for two novels, the posthumously published "The Way of All Flesh", a semi-autobiographical novel, and "Erewhon", a weird hodgepodge of utopian novel, both of which touch upon a lot of similar themes, but from opposite ends of the literary spectrum.  

So Samuel Butler was born on December 4th, 1835 at Langar Rectory in Nottingham. His father was Reverend Thomas Butler, and his grandfather was Dr. Samuel Butler, who was famous in his own right, being headmaster of the Shrewsbury School, and later the Bishop of Lichfield, who, like any proper schoolmaster, was also a classical scholar and produced a translation of Aeschylus.  

Butler the grandson wrote about Butler the grandfather, and certainly the classics influence runs in the family. Butler the grandson grew up in a religiously oppressive household, largely stemming from his father, and something he would internalize for the rest of his life. And this part of his life, his early childhood, including the lives of his parents and ancestors, are fictionalized and exaggerated in "The Way of All Flesh". Butler was educated from an early age and traveled with his family to Italy when he was eight, which he referred to as his second country, and certainly we can see some reverence for the Italians in our novel tonight, one of the many things he would take solace in as a child. He started to attend Shrewsbury in 1848, his grandfather had died by this point, so someone else was a schoolmaster, a Benjamin Hall Kennedy. He didn't have a good time here, and Kennedy forms a basis for the character of Dr. Skinner from "The Way of All Flesh".  

In his first year of attendance, he travels to Italy for a second time, and this is where he meets another lifelong law of his, the music of Handel. He says, quote, as a boy from 12 years old or so, I always worshiped Handel. And indeed, Butler wrote a lot about Handel. There is an entire section of his notebooks dedicated to Handel in his musings.  

He said, "I only ever met one American who seemed to like and understand Handel." And unfortunately, I can't add myself to his list as I always found Handel incredibly boring. I don't know how you guys feel about him, but it just makes me feel like I'm at a funeral home.  

JM:  

Uh, yeah I actually saw a performance of the Messiah piece...  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Suite. And I mean, that's, even my dad for a while was going on and on about it. And I remember having to listen to it in school as well. And I'm like, I don't know. I don't like it that much. It's got a certain grandiosity to it, but I guess some of this Baroque period music is very religious in nature too. And like, it's kind of, I don't know, it depends on the music. I mean, I'm not going to say it's always off-putting because some of these spiritual religious things have spawned some really cool art. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I really like some Bach music and stuff like that. But generally I don't find myself wanting to listen to that kind of thing.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I actually like Bach a lot. And the composers Butler spends a lot of time trashing Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. I really enjoy a lot more than Handel. He says, "I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart's Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal, which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes."  

JM:  

I've seen that one performed as well.  

Nate:  

He spends a lot of time talking about how he dislikes Bach.  

JM:  

There's another musical snob like Sprague.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right.  

I'm not sure how much we would get along with music.  

JM:  

Play him some rock and roll. How do you like that, Sam?  

Nate:  

He'd be horrified.  

But in 1854, he went to Cambridge to attend St. John's College, especially intending to study mathematics but switched over to classics. Harris, one of his biographers, says that we can only speculate on a social life at Cambridge, but it would seem he was on pretty good terms with the faculty and his peers and was on the College Boat Club.  

During this time, he wrote a number of skits which are included in "A First Year in Canterbury Settlement" and contributed a number of pieces to the Eagle, which was the St. John's Magazine. The Cambridge Simeonites, followers of the cleric Charles Simeon, who at this time had been dead for about 20 years, but his intellectual legacy lived on through the Sims, as referred to, who are also detailed in "The Way of All Flesh". The Sims were a rather evangelical set, and as Butler was intending to be ordained at this time, the pull of the Sims was something he rather fell into. There's a rather odd bit from the "Simeonite Manifesto", which I wanted to quote because it contains a mathematical equation in it. It says, "the one thing needed is faith. Faith is one-quarter historical faith plus three-quarters heart belief or assurance or justification plus five-force peace, and peace is equal to L to the nth power trust minus care plus joy, raised to the power of N minus R plus one."  

JM:  

Wow.  

Nate:  

Whatever that means.  

JM:  

Feed that one to the analytical engine.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right. There's a lot of this weird mathematics and numerology stuff also parried in Flesh, but he starts to have doubts about joining the ministry when he lives in the west end of London among the poor. The triggering event here is the issue of infant baptism. He learns that baptism among infants is low amongst the poor, and a lack of baptism or a cleansing of the sins doesn't seem to affect their moral behavior very much as adults. He brings his doubts to his father, and the two decide that he should emigrate to New Zealand, which he does in 1859.  

JM:  

What a thing for his dad to say.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, a very strange conclusion to draw there.  

JM:  

I'd like you to get as far away from me as you possibly can.  

Nate:  

That's probably what it was, I'm sure he was pissed off.  

But his New Zealand experiences are partially documented in "A First Year in Canterbury Settlement" based on a series of letters that Butler had sent home, though Butler says they were heavily cut before being published, possibly revised by his father. Upon arriving in New Zealand, the top of the day is sheep, and Butler seems to enjoy sheep farming, but still devote some time to pondering these sorts of religious questions. Here he begins to compose the pamphlet "On the Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as Given by the Four Evangelists Critically Examined", where he starts to question the miracle critical to the Christian faith. He would later go back on this position as evidenced by some passage from "The Fair Haven", which was published in 1873, so it's kind of interesting how much his personal views on religion seem to change back and forth throughout his entire life. During his stay in New Zealand, Darwin's "Origin of the Species" was published, and Butler himself was quite taken by the natural history of New Zealand, so Darwin really resonated with him quite deeply.  

Inspired by this, he wrote what Harris describes as, "the most brilliant of his occasional writings, possibly the most brilliant individual piece that he ever wrote", which is, of course, "Darwin Among the Machines", and it was printed as a letter to the editor for the newspaper called The Press on June 13th of 1863, signed under the pseudonym of Cellarius. And Butler speculates that with the rapid rate of technological acceleration, machines will develop consciousness and eventually gain the upper hand over humanity, and we'll definitely get into this later, but it's really astonishing that a piece of writing like this is from 1863, especially when we consider what technology was at the time. Babbage's work was dead in the water, Herman Hollerith wasn't on the scene yet, even the telephone hadn't been invented, and the telegraph was really the only practical use of electrical technologies at the time. Thomas Edison was still working as a telegraph operator, so things like Edison's R&D lab, Taylor's scientific management, never mind the 20th century computing developments were all decades away, but here Butler is in 1863 with these kind of questions in his head.  

So he finishes off his time in New Zealand, which was a total of three years on the island, writing some criticism of Shakespeare, namely "The Tempest", and returns to England, arriving back in England in 1864, settling in London in Clifford's Inn where he lived for the remainder of his life.  

Upon returning to London, he became interested in art study and publishes his pamphlet on the resurrection, the main conclusion of which is that the Gospel evidence is not sufficient to justify a belief in Christ's death and resurrection from the dead. In 1865, he follows up Darwin among the machines with "Lubricato Ebria", which discusses the idea of machines as limbs as an extension of man. These two pieces were what "Erewhon" grew from, which is completed and published anonymously in standalone novel form in 1872.  

"Erewhon" can be seen as his first major work, after which he's incredibly prolific, writing a great deal of satires, essays, and literary criticism. He publishes "The Fair Haven" in 1873, but most importantly in this year, this is the time where he starts "The Way of All Flesh". And we're not really going to get into a lot of his other nonfiction, as it's pretty off-scope for the podcast. I'll only briefly highlight his Homer criticism, where he proposes a female author for "The Odyssey" in his 1897 book, "The Authoress of the Odyssey". He was quite taken by "The Odyssey" and even wrote some music inspired by it. The reception of these pieces, namely Ulysses, which you heard at the beginning of this segment, and Narcissus, which he remarks upon by saying, "Handel was a greater man than Homer, I mean the author of the Iliad, but the very people who are most angry with me for, as they incorrectly suppose, sneering at Homer are generally the ones who never miss an opportunity of cheapening and belittling Handel, and which is very painful to myself. They say I was laughing at him in Narcissus, perhaps, but surely one can laugh at a person and adore him at the same time."  

So if you feel that we're laughing at Butler for his musical abilities in the rendition of Ulysses, well, maybe we are a little bit, but maybe we can laugh at him and adore him a bit at the same time.  

So Butler died on June 18, 1902, but with Samuel Butler, death is not the end. The work he spent the most amount of time and effort into and the work he wanted to be chiefly remembered by was "The Way of All Flesh", which was written over a period from 1873 to 1885, and was published posthumously in 1903, only one year after his death. It's a semi-autobiographical novel, but according to R.S. Garnett, it cut very deeply into his family members, namely his father and his sisters, portraying them as well as other characters as far more grotesque and cruel than they actually were. And Garnett's book is pretty much an extended defense of Butler's extended family. He cuts into them that deeply.  

As early as 1886, Butler had recognized this and gave explicit instructions that the book was not to be published until he and everybody else in his family died, but his literary executor totally ignored this as he was very impressed by his novel. He wanted to publish it immediately, not caring that his two sisters were still alive or how it would make them feel upon being published.  

Yeah, so not a very cool move there, but Butler seemed to be a very deeply bitter person from "The Way of All Flesh", and Garnett highlights the following passage, "he felt bitter not because of anything his father had done to him. These grievances were too old to be remembered now, but because he would never allow him to feel towards him as he was always trying to feel. As long as communication was confined to the nearest common places all went well, but if these were departed from ever such a little, he invariably felt that his father's instincts showed themselves in immediate opposition to his own. When he was attacked, his father laid whatever stress was possible on everything, which his opponent said, it met with any check his father was clearly pleased. What the old doctor had said about Theobald, speaking ill of no man was perfectly true as regards others than himself, but he knew perfectly well that no one had injured his reputation in a quiet way, so far as he dared to do, more than his own father."  

So, he puts a lot of his father issues into the novel. I read the novel in 2019 and liked it, though didn't love it. It's definitely a moody and satirical take on the bildungsroman, and there's some weird sex stuff in it that's a bit uncomfortable. There's been a great deal of speculation that Butler was gay and repressing his sexuality, so his frustrations might explain some of those passages, but still there is actual characters and plot progression, dialogue and everything that you'd expect from your canonical Victorian novel, which is certainly something quite different than the one we'll be looking at tonight.  

JM:  

Yeah, yeah.  

Nate:  

It made quite that splash upon publication, and according to Harris, Butler's influence, really came onto the literary scene after his death, and Butler himself said of his own writing, "Posterity will give a man a fair hearing. His own times will not do so if he is attacking vested interest, and I have attacked two powerful sets of vested interest at once, the church and science. What is the good of addressing people who will not listen? I have addressed the next generation and have therefore said many things, which want time before they become palatable. Any man who wishes his work to stand will sacrifice a good deal of his immediate audience for the sake of being attractive to a much larger number of people later on."  

So I think that's a good place to leave the man before we move on to the novel. I just want to end with one minor footnote, also published posthumously, were "The Notebooks of Samuel Butler", which came 10 years after his death, Harris says they provide a much greater insight into the man than even "The Way of All Flesh" does, but he at the same time describes it as more of an accompaniment piece rather than a main work, and it is indeed not a diary, but it's rather a collection of random thoughts and musings that he must have jotted down over the course of several decades.  

As in his own works, he says, "One's thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them. It is no use trying to put salt on their tails."  

So with this collection, "The Way of All Flesh", and the huge amount of secondary literature published on Butler, you'll have plenty of stuff to dive into if you want any further reading about the man himself and his thoughts.  

(music: Handel excerpted harpsichord suite from "Erewhon", chapter 5)  

"Erewhon" spoiler discussion and summary  

"Erewhon", as previously stated, was published in a standalone format in 1872, incorporating an expanded version of "Darwin Among" Machines and "Lubricato Ebria" as "The Book of the Machines". "Darwin Among the Machines" itself had another intermediary revision called "Mechanical Creation", which appeared in the publication The Reasoner in 1865.  

During this time, Butler wrote the chapters which would form the musical banks, The World of the Unborn, and The Trial of the Man Suffering from Consumption, and he largely sat on these ideas for about five years, writing the rest in late 1870 and early 1871, finishing his first draft in May of 1871, which was initially rejected for publication by Chapman and Hall.  

JM:  

So when you think about how this book was written in the different periods and interims, it makes total sense now. This is not a novel. This is just him basically writing down different ideas that he had, scattershot, and just kind of going, oh, how can I make it into something cohesive?  

Gretchen:  

Which does feel very similar to some other utopian fiction, where it's not really about a full plot, but more about the concepts that are being dealt with in the novel or in the story.  

Nate:  

Yeah, exactly. And I think we're going to keep the non-spoiler discussion on this pretty short, because like a lot of these utopian novels, there's really not much to spoil. I mean, he basically goes to a society, tells you about it, and then leaves, and that's like the plot for like every utopian novel out there.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, getting a grand tour and then getting out of there.  

Nate:  

But I would like to briefly just talk about our feelings on it generally. So I definitely have a bit to say on that. I don't know how you guys felt. I think we're all pretty much on the same page, but...  

JM:  

Yeah, probably. I don't know. Well, okay, so I was dreading this one a little bit. I had a feeling because of the other utopian novels we had done, I had a feeling I knew what this would be like. And I will point out that this book came out the year after Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Coming Race". And I could not help but compare this book to "The Coming Race" on multiple levels.  

Nate:  

And I think a lot of people did that to the point where he felt justified in writing a whole preface to the book saying, really guys, I didn't read "The Coming Race", honestly.  

JM:  

Yeah, and "The Coming Race" did not make my top 10 books or anything like that. When we talked about that in 2020, beginning of 2021, I guess it would have been.  

Nate:  

Yeah, it's been a while now, but...  

JM:  

But I did like it. I did like it and it sagged a little bit in certain parts. But in general, it had a plot to it and it had characters. It was better than this book and I'm sorry Gretchen, you didn't get to read that book instead of this one.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I definitely think "The Coming Race" is the better novel. This is dry.  

JM:  

I think this one actually started out quite well. I was happy about it at first. I was like, yeah, cool. It's going to be an adventure in a lost world, right? And I'm like, right, awesome. Tell me more.  

Gretchen:  

Well, I have not read "The Coming Race" not only not for the podcast, but not in my free time. But I have read some utopian fiction, some that you both have gone over in the podcast, even though I wasn't there for like "300 Years Hence" in some of the feminist utopias you went over. And so I kind of went in also a little wary because of that.  

JM:  

Those ones have the advantage of being shorter than this one.  

Gretchen:  

Yes, that's the thing is they are short. They're short stories and this is a full length novel. And yeah, I was surprised during the first part of it when it does feel, I think that it does go quickly in the first several chapters before he gets to Erewhon and it does drag after you reach further into the novel.  

I think that there are some interesting concepts in the work, but yeah, it's not perhaps the most interesting novel to read.  

Nate:  

No, it definitely isn't. And it's, I guess, interesting in the sense that it's so segmented. So I guess my recommendation to everybody on this one would be reading only "The Book of the Machines" segment, as it's definitely the most applicable part to science fiction. I think it has the most interesting concepts and also unlike the Jarry where they excerpted something that is just like embedded in the novel. "The Book of the Machines" is a totally separate text from everything else. The narrator is like literally picking up a book and giving us a bridge translation of it. So it can easily be excerpted without losing any context.  

And it seems to me something that would be an obvious fit for one of those gigantic science fiction anthologies if they're looking to abridge a text because this one has indefinite need of abridgment.  

JM:  

Right. They tend to excerpt things and sometimes not really explain why they're excerpting or what it is. Yeah. Yeah. No, that would work. I definitely thought that there could have been a way to make this kind of satire because there is a lot of satire in it.  

Gretchen:  

And there are some ideas that I think are interesting, I like with the book of the unborn, there's this idea of like, well, it's the unborn's fault for coming into this world. Like, I think that's very funny, but the way that it's executed it is kind of dull to read. But like, if that had been done differently, it would have been very funny, I think.  

Nate:  

And for as many parts like that, there are so many parts of satire that just feel like lazy. Like the College of Unreason, it's like really, that's the best you could come up with?  

JM:  

Yeah, it's definitely not that sharp. But it's not. I think if you, he could have done it in a different way and had us like actually sit in on a class of the College of Unreason.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

And shown us how funny it was, like, I don't know, "The Clouds" by Aristophanes or something like that. But he doesn't do anything like that. So it's very, there's like, there's no dialogue in this book, really. There's no, no characterization of anyone, just kind of the point of view character he apparently wants to convert everyone to Christianity and make money.  

Nate:  

Yep.  

JM:  

Those are his goals.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

So, yeah. And the writer of the introduction of the Penguin Edition. He was very quick to point out the novel's flaws to the point where it was kind of one of those things that reminded me, oh, I shouldn't read this kind of thing till after. Even though it says introduction, I shouldn't read it till after I finished the work.  

Gretchen:  

It's funny that usually you expect the introductions of a work to make you kind of whet your appetite for what's to come, but instead it's just when it's pointing out the flaws of the novel, maybe the novel isn't worth reading.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he like, he seems to spend more time talking about the novel's flaws than the admittedly, according to him, inventive nature of it. So, and I like the beginning and I like the very end. Like, not even the last chapter, but the epilogue at the end was a nice twist that actually kind of made me laugh.  

Gretchen:  

The last, like, paragraph is very fun where it seems like it's just like, please send me money. I need, things are not going well.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

And we'll get to that in a bit, but it's just one of the last lines in the novel is literally, please subscribe.  

Gretchen:  

Click the bell.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

I guess in this case, the machine.  

But yeah, so I guess if you're content with just reading "Book of the Machines", you can take the next, however long it takes us to get through this as the summary. I certainly don't think you would miss anything too much if you did that.  

JM:  

Yeah, I think that getting that out of the way early is good because there's really not much plot. So, yeah.  

Nate:  

So I guess as we go along, I'd like to pause several times in general to discuss the idea being discussed here and there by the second as we arrive to it. So we'll just take it into the order that it comes.  

So we start off with a narrator telling us that his background is tedious. So he's skipping it. We wish he did in other parts of the novel, but no know such luck. He wishes to leave England for somewhere new. His name is apparently Higgs, but I don't think this name ever appears in the text throughout the course of the novel. And he's only name such at the beginning of "Erewhon Revisited". So I was like pretty confused at first when digging into some of the crit on this work.  

JM:  

We said he didn't want to. He didn't want to reveal that information because I guess like "The Coming Race" or "Herland", it's like it would be really bad if everybody else discovered this.  

Nate:  

Right.  

JM:  

But I guess the funny thing in retrospect about this is it's just so that because the author wants to make money, I think that's mostly his reasoning.  

Nate:  

So profits definitely on his mind. He didn't really succeed that well in his design to farm, but he found something else and he's going to tell his entire story in case nobody believes him. So he reaches destination in the tail end of 1868 and declines to say where it is other than it's largely uninhabited, say for a few indigenous people. The land is good, beautiful and perfect for farming, including the raising of sheep. And the narrator here is 22 years old, so he has nice head start on everything.  

And it is very much like New Zealand. It's beautiful farming, but lonely and monotonous. And in watching the sheep traverse the mountains, he wonders what lies beyond them. Nobody really knows what lies beyond it. And they seem quite vast, but maybe riches are there.  

So let's find out.  

Shearing season comes. And in asking Chowbok, which is a nickname for Kahabuka, is a sort of chief of the indigenous peoples, about the mountains. And he gets very uneasy. Chowbok is prone to boozing and the narrator wants some information. So the next day he gets him into the wool shed with the promise of some rum. And it takes a little bit of effort, but Chowbok gets drunk.  

JM:  

Yeah, and I thought this part was really funny because a couple of times this happened early on in the book where Butler was describing something. And I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. That looks really majestic or something. And then he's like, it was horrible. And I'm kind of picturing like Chowbok, like sort of jumping on top of this thing and being like, oh, now he's going to be like a king and make a proclamation, right? And I was like, yeah, show us what's what, right? And then I was like, oh, no, it was horrible to look at.   

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

And like, it's really funny.  

Nate:  

Makeshift thrown out of wool bales he just kind of pieces together. And yeah, the narrator just does not like it at all and just runs away. And the next day he's appearing quite timid. The narrator is more confused by all of this. So over the next few days, the narrator calls him his real name, Kahabuka, telling him that he wants to go to the nearer mountain ranges to look for gold. He doesn't mention anything about the larger main range, as this is the one that seems to frighten him. But he's convinced him enough to set off with him for this journey.  

So in the summer solstice of 1870, they set off with horse and provisions. The first day up the river is easy. The weather is nice. The scenery is beautiful. They tether their horses and make camp and enjoy some freshly caught duck. These are the good times, though, which might not last for much longer. But they get to sleep and get to going the next day. However, going is tough. They're not able to make much progress, and it starts raining so all their stuff gets wet. They're able to get a fire going and get some sleep and survey the land. But it seems useless for sheep farming. The main mountain ranges in view, glaciers are tumbling down it. He desires to follow the river and sifts for some gold, and Chowbok's dislike of the main range seems to disappear.  

They spend three weeks in exploring. The narrator finds one stream that appears to be a pass through the mountains, which Chowbok said was impassable, who is clearly lying. But the narrator goes off to check for himself.  

So this is where Chowbok just runs off and deserts him. And as time is of the essence, the narrator pushes on into the mountains. He reaches the top of the saddle and realizes he's not on the main range, but rather surrounded by immense drops, glaciers and huge riverbeds. However, through the clouds for a few minutes, he sees what appears to be an easy pass and decides to make his way for it.  

This is tough going, though. Navigating the sharp rift is quite difficult, and though he is eventually able to find a place to camp and start a fire. He dreams of the music coming from an organ in the wool shed, which eventually morphs into a giant golden city carved into the side of the mountain. Somewhat touches him and says, do you not see? It is Handel. Who else?  

JM:  

And this part made me too think I was going to get some like really fantastic otherworldly imagery and dream sequences and stuff. Like that'd be cool. And then he goes, it was horrible.  

Nate:  

Yeah, but you'll hear the Handel music that he excerpts from. The dream is quite lucid, and he wakes up just as sharply, and he can almost hear such music on the wind. And he starts out on the descent, his boots are wearing thin, but he estimates the saddle's about 9,000 feet high. The riverbed about 3,000 feet above sea level with the current strongly rushing downwards. Fording the river is impossible, and a raft is the only option, which he spends all day weaving out of various plants. Finding a suitable spot on the river, he makes an attempt with his gear. But unfortunately he gets sucked in by the rapids, which dump him about a mile down the river. But on the correct side, so that's good. And all the stuff is intact, only his gear is wet, not destroyed or missing. He's able to eat some of the waterfowl, and starts to muse on how he wanted to convert Chowbok to Christianity, even baptizing him. This is a bit melancholy, but the good food helps, as does the pound of tobacco and six ounces of brandy he has left, of which he drinks two.  

In the morning he has a climb ahead of him, and after several hours the air gets thicker, and heavier, to the point where it impacts visibility. He thinks he passes out, and sees a bunch of shapes around him, unmistakably human, but they don't appear to be moving. It's some kind of stonehenge type thing. A strong wind blows through, carrying an evil feeling with it, and it feels like the statues are chanting. And when he later returns to England, a piece of Handel a friend plays reminds him of this moment, and he gives us some sheet music here.  

He finds himself on a narrow path, and realizes where he's at is inhabited, and he comes upon bridges, which is a relief, a sign that he's in civilization. The landscape opens up in a gorgeous sight with the clouds, revealing a number of towns and cities, but he's too tired to go on and passes out. He's awoken by bells, and sees some goats feeding, two girls approaching him, and see him, and then run off in fear.  

He decides to stay there to meet his fate, and the girls come back with a party of armed men, the people having a complexion like South Italians, Spaniards, or Arabs.  

JM:  

Yeah, some of the best people on earth.  

Nate:  

Yeah, no, he loves the Italians.  

JM:  

Yeah, look what he wants to do with them.  

Nate:  

Yeah, he's sure not to make any aggressive movements and speaks calmly to them in English, even though they don't understand.  

JM:  

Maybe he should try turning it backwards.  

Nate:  

He points to one of the mountains and makes a grimace, imitating the statues, and the narrator laughs, which makes everybody else laugh. One of them beckons him to follow. They lead him to a hamlet, and are again surprised at the smoking of tobacco, so again, a common theme through the podcast here.  

JM:  

Yeah, smoke good.  

Nate:  

He's given a bunk to sleep in, in one of the huts, which he does until the next day. They seem to view him as a curiosity, and notices their mannerisms are very much like the Italians, but their technology appears to be primitive, but has a certain character of sophistication. He's not sure if they're Italian, Jewish, Greek, or what, but doesn't know any of these languages anyways, and it doesn't appear that they're religious.  

JM:  

And he comes up with this idea that they're the lost tribes of Israel.  

Nate:  

Yeah, exactly.  

JM:  

And he just won't let go of that. Yeah. It's so funny, and he even comments on that at the end. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why I like that very end of the book. It's just like, oh, they're the lost tribes of Israel. Damn it, I know. Based on no evidence whatsoever.  

Nate:  

Yeah. No, I think he's just looking for a reason to convert everybody he can to Christianity.  

Gretchen:  

And of course, we know that he only wants to do it because he's like, oh, well, that means I'll be saved. So that's, that's pretty great.  

Nate:  

Yeah. Yeah. It's a very odd motivation, and it just seems kind of selfish and, I don't know.  

JM:  

Oh, he's an asshole for sure.  

Nate:  

Yeah. So yeah, he gets this idea that he's going to convert them all to Christianity in his head. And after eating, he's beckoned to follow them into the valley. And they follow a path for a few miles. They go through the forest and they pass several shrines along the way. And they eventually come upon a village, similar to the one they just left. The things are quite similar to Europe, but just slightly different. The people, however, are strikingly beautiful and elegant.  

They keep going through the plains where goats and dogs are abundant. And after passing a few more villages, they come to a town that looks like Domodossola or Faido, which are two Italian towns, the latter of which is in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and both of which I had to look up because I'd never heard of either before.  

JM:  

Yeah. So this is kind of the opposite of "Herland" too, right? Because her land, they had only cats.  

Nate:  

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I guess a mirror and more.  

JM:  

Here's like, we don't have cats. We don't have cats here in Erewhon. We don't know what those are.  

Nate:  

Just goats and dogs. Yeah. The chief magistrate places him in an apartment with two other people, both of which appear to be quite unwell in some way. And the narrator is treated to a physical examination, and they also root through all of his stuff. And they're quite confused by the tobacco pipe, but eventually like the smell and the taste.  

However, they're quite concerned by the pocket watch. And he's led into what appears to be the town's museum, containing a number of curiosities, skeletons, stone carvings, taxidermy and the like. There's pieces of machines which are all broken, several hundreds of years old, but yet appear to be just as sophisticated as modern European technology. In the last case are several clocks and watches. The magistrate compares his to theirs, and the judge is clearly upset, and the watch is taken from him.  

JM:  

Yeah. The kind of machines that Padway couldn't build.  

Nate:  

Yeah. Very sophisticated and very concerning, as he is then taken to prison, and he is quite helpless and is musing on a situation. The society seems no more advanced than 13th century Europe, but these machines that are centuries old what's the deal with that?  

He speculates they've mined their minerals dry and have been for centuries, but a young woman comes in with food, and she's quite beautiful, apparently the daughter of a jailer. And another man comes in with pen and paper, again slightly different, and they're to learn each other's languages.  

So, the language is non-Indo-European, but they make some progress on basics, and he learns the daughter's name is Yram, and she is a great teacher. He finds some wort growing locally, which is an OK tobacco substitute, and he crafts a flute. European melodies greatly impressed these people. However, he learns that illnesses are greatly shunned in Erewhon, and people look upon it as almost insulting. This explains the two men in jail with him initially. His only offense is the pocket watch.  

JM:  

Good thing that he's really healthy.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

He has light-colored hair.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

That gives him, those are exonerating circumstances for his criminal behavior.  

Nate:  

Right, and we're going to get to that in just a second, which is probably the first major theme that comes up. But a month passes and he becomes fluent in the language and learns that as long as he's in good health, he can be discharged from the prison and is summoned to the major metropolis by the king and queen.  

An interpreter says he's been invited to stay with a merchant who has embezzled some money, and the narrator staunchly refuses this, which confuses the interpreter saying he's worth a great deal in horsepower, which is how wealth is measured there. The interpreter is also surprised that he doesn't consider illness to be a grave offense, and tells him that he's lucky what he's saying hasn't been overheard by others or else it could mean trouble. Yram is quite distressed at his going away, and he gives her a few keepsakes and sets out on the long tedious journey and is blindfolded during the day. The driver tells them that they must keep their route secret, and the narrator is visited by all kinds of people from the College of Unreason.  

He learns that their religion involved human sacrifice and their antiquity, sacrificing the ugly people from all over the range where Chowbok was from. None of Chowbok's people had crossed over the range in ages. They're not ugly enough to be criminally liable, but too ugly to go out on their own. It's a lovely way of describing and setting up a society there.  

But he learns about the old machines that about 400 years ago, a professor wrote a book theorizing the replacement of man with machines and had forbid the use of all recent machinery. And he'll definitely get more into this later, but is told their journey is almost over after about a month, and the blindfold is now removed, and they come into the great metropolis. His embezzling host, Senoj Nasnibor, I guess, seems quite...  

JM:  

Nasnibor.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Just remember the song every time you see it. You know what song I'm talking about, right?  

Nate:  

I don't know which one is that.  

JM:  

And here's to you, Mrs. Nasnibor. Jesus loves you more than you will know.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Sorry, I just... When I was a kid... I guess I'm going to tell a funny story, but... When I was a kid, a buddy of mine, my best friend when we were, like, pre-puberty, we like to do talk about a lot of this normal stuff that young kids like to talk about, like bodily functions and stuff like that.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

And we do this in public, and the adults would get really pissed off and not like it. So we finally decided, well, if we just say everything backwards, they'll never know what we're talking about.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right.  

JM:  

And whenever I see something that's better, like, I'm trying to figure out his naming conventions because the Nasnibors are the Robinsons. Right, yeah. And Yram is Mary.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

And Sims or whatever it was was Smith.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

And... But then some of them don't follow that convention at all. So I don't know. He's just like... He's just doing whatever, right? But this is a little kind of funny because I kept hearing that song every time I was like... Talking about the Nasnibors and...  

Nate:  

Right. It's a true mirror image of English society, but this Nasnibor seems like a quite pleasant man and has rather uneasy at dinner. And his wife and daughter explained to him the cause of his suffering and with the straightener, which will be detailed later also. So if a man falls ill before he's 70, he's tried before a jury. Some illnesses are punished very severely, whereas criminal acts like robbery only receive a light sentence in a hospital.  

His mind turns back to Italy again and he notes some similarities with Muslim and New Zealand Maori societies. In Erewhon, a straightener, is someone trained in soulcraft who treats criminal behavior as a doctor in England would treat it cold.  

So here is where I want to pause for two reasons.  

So one is up to this point. It looks like this novel actually might have a plot. The adventuring at the beginning is a lot of fun. And the narrator/Higgs is actually like doing stuff and interacting with characters. And here there's a potential for an actual story, but we never get one. So...  

JM:  

Yeah, it just stops and then picks up in the last like 10 pages or something.  

Nate:  

Right.  

Gretchen:  

It's probably the last like two chapters up until then. Yeah, they just loses the plot and you just get a bunch of like ideas and like vignettes about ideas.  

Nate:  

Yeah, so here we're in full on utopian mode. And of course we are satirizing English society as Erewhon is "nowhere" backwards. So it's a mirror image of England. And we get that in the characters names and a whole bunch of other stuff is reversed too.  

So here is the first major idea that Butler is presenting us with that is sickness and physical ailments are treated in almost eugenics-like fashion. Where what we perceive of criminality is addressed through the social institutions, hospitals and straighteners, not incarceration.  

So physical illness and criminality, the treatment of which is reversed here.  

So I don't know, what did you guys think of this idea? It's kind of an interesting way of portraying it.  

JM:  

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It is pretty absurd. I don't know. I mean, like at the same time, you can see you can see kind of why he did this, I guess. But I don't think he believes like I'm not quite sure what he's trying to get at with it. Like, I guess to just say that the system as it is right now is pretty absurd as well. I guess.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I think that's one aspect of it. I think there's also something I think I was going to address a little more is that maybe it's better to treat criminals as a social reform problem not punish them. And inflict retribution or... JM:  

Right, but he's definitely not trying to say that ill people should be treated like criminals.  

Nate:  

Right.  

JM:  

Like, I don't think I mean, he keeps saying he thinks that that's barbaric.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Right. So I don't know. I guess like it's like you said, the mirror image. So it's supposed to kind of throw a light onto the system that is there now. That's the essence of the satire.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah. You get those moments when people are in court for physical ailments. And it's like, well, you have  circumstances surrounding your illness, but we're going to discount that or it's sort of considered something that can assuage them of guilt. But we don't look at that the same way with like, there are circumstances around people who commit crimes and why there's there's a reason why certain people would need to steal or something that we don't, at this point, we don't treat that with the same sort of consideration that we do people who are suffering physically.  

Nate:  

Yeah, the English justice system was incredibly harsh at the time. I don't know if they were still hanging people for petty theft at this time, but they certainly were like a couple of decades prior, which is just crazy if you think about it.  

JM:  

To think about, yeah. There was one thing where I kind of thought, oh this is a little bit forward thinking in that the straighteners reminded me of like psychiatrists and stuff, basically, which obviously didn't exist yet.  

Gretchen:  

Of course, the straighteners do whip people, but like, we don't have to think about that.  

JM:  

But sometimes you have to do that to somebody to make them better.  

Gretchen:  

Sometimes you have to go through pain.  

JM:  

I'm sure we can all agree. I'm sure we can all agree about the necessity of whippings and flagellation and maybe maybe a little cutting in order to improve people's mental health and well-being.  

Nate:  

So that's probably how asylums were run back then with the constant physical abuse and all that. And yeah, the straighteners like this weird, I don't know, almost like a mesmerist like quack. I don't know. It's a very odd figure.  

JM:  

Yeah, well, they are kind of that because that's what the doctors mostly were.  

Nate:  

Right.  

JM:  

So a straightener is like a physician, but they're treated criminal behavior. So it's kind of like more like a psychologist like a mental health professional.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

But a Victorian era one, right?   

Nate:  

Right.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Which didn't really exist strictly speaking it's like people had some weird mental condition was because I don't know if their humours were out of whack or whatever. Right. And it's just like, just generally not really a lot of understanding of that. I mean, even.  

Gretchen:  

Or you were just a woman and you were hysterical and we have to lock you up.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Yeah. Yeah. Even now, mental health is such a misunderstood and not even by the experts, not truly fully comprehended thing. Right. So, I don't know, it's just interesting to see him writing about that. And I, I guess one of the cool things, and I'm sure I've pointed this out on the podcast before, but one of the cool things about the world building aspect of some of this kind of fiction and science fiction in general, is that sometimes it's really easy to think of stories within like stories that don't exist within that world. And you're like, oh like, why not write a story about a man and his straightener.  

Nate:  

Right.  

JM:  

Like that would be kind of cool.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

You know, I said, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting that  Mr. Nasnibor really needs a straightener.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

You feel like the main character should be nervous staying in his house all the time. And it's kind of like, well, not really, right, because he's just ill.  

You know, it's like, what do you mean? Would you, would you resent being in a house with a person with like a cough? I don't think so. Like, what kind of person are you really? You don't like being in the house with a criminal?  

There's really, there's definitely some. I'm not entirely sure sometimes if I'm laughing with Butler or what he's depicting, but it is pretty, it's pretty fun kind of.  

Gretchen:  

The one part I did think was very funny is there is a euphemism for when people know someone is physically sick, but they don't want anyone to know. They'll say, oh, well they were out stealing socks. Like that's like because obviously stealing is better than being ill. So they're like, oh, well, they were just stealing stocks.  

JM:  

And yeah, that part made me laugh too, where the character, the guy is like kind of sick, right? And he's in prison and he's like kind of acting like this because he's got this woman taking care of him. And he's like, oh, she'll, her mother instincts will really kick in when she sees that I'm sick, right? And then she looks at him, my scans is like, okay, what's wrong with you? Like, yeah.  

Gretchen:  

Then later on, he does have an ill temper and they all come and rush to him. And then he's like, maybe I should say I have ill temper more often if people are going to treat me like this.  

JM:  

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. True. Like, how are you doing? I'm, I'm angry.  

Gretchen:  

You poor thing.  

Nate:  

Yeah. So straighteners, that's what our host here has to deal with. And it seems like their method of psychiatry is flogging. That's pretty much what they do. And that is what our host is experiencing from defrauding the stock market, but his conscious weighs on him.  

So he goes to the straightener for treatment. So it's for this reason sometimes that they aren't very forthcoming, but it also has the odd effect that their idioms and greetings are slightly different than ours. He's fined, given no food, but bread and milk and flogged once a month for a year. And he has just received his 11th flogging before the narrator arrives.  

The straightener's thus are schooled for a long time in their arts as disease here is a very complicated subject. The justice system is complex and strange. And the narrator attends the personal bereavement court. Here, the procedures of the court mimic the European court system, but justice itself seems to be quite perverted.  

He sees the case of a man who lost his wife and is now caring for his three young children. The defense was he never really cared for his wife, but the prosecution shows many witnesses to demonstrate otherwise. He's found guilty and sentenced to six months hard labor, though the judge commuted to three on the recommendation of mercy as he'd only insured her life through an insurance company, and he's also fined 25% of his gain from this.  

The next case heard is a youth who is swindled out of his property by his guardian. His punishment is to apologize to his guardian and to be flogged. Pulmonary consumption, or TB, used to be punishable by death. And while the punishment is less severe now, such a case is now being heard. The defense against TB is saying he was trying to defraud insurance or something and just faking it, but the evidence is too strong and he is convicted. This is especially severe as he has a previous conviction for bronchitis. Childhood illnesses are always the excuses of the criminal, and the judge is really getting at the point if he's innately corrupted, which is mimicking some of the arguments one might hear applied to morality in a European court.  

The judge has no sympathy and sentences him to hard labor for the rest of his life, much to the cheers from the courtroom, as indeed there is quite a deal of respect for the law in order in Erewhon.  

Everyone in the court system seems in unanimous agreement that it's the correct way of doing things, and the narrator muses on comparing it with morality of quarantining during a yellow outbreak fever, or sending insane people to the asylums. However, it seems cruel to blame someone for circumstances beyond their control, or that were imposed on them during birth.  

The justice system used to be more severe in the immediate preceding years than narrator's arrival. People largely indifferent to sufferings of others other than their own until a reformer came along devoted to making a permanent change. Elements are divided into three categories, those of the head, trunk, and the lower limbs, all requiring different treatments. However, these kind of reforms met with resistance as if they were subverting morality. Death is viewed with less abhorrence than disease. The dead are burned and ashes scattered to a place of the deceased choosing. There is no monuments or epitaphs, there is no attendance at the scattering ceremony, but rather people send boxes of artificial tears instead, which vary in number to how well they knew the deceased.  

Some rich people decide to commission statues of themselves while they are still alive, and there aren't a great deal of statues of public men. This, however, used to not be the case 500 years ago, though the lower classes felt these were a mockery and rose up to destroy all of them. Very few remain, some are in museums, but to return to death, no letters of condolences are written, and for birth it is treated as an illness to be kept secret, with babies kept out of sight until they can walk and talk.  

Nasnibor is looking forward to his final flogging, and the narrator is called upon by a lady, Mahaina, who is suffering from dipsomania, but fortunately is in otherwise excellent health. They recommend a straightener, that doesn't seem to help. Zulora, the eldest daughter, thinks she is faking being a boozer to cover up her frail constitution. This triggers an argument of if she's faking it or not, and the narrator seems exasperated that these people can't see the conditions of the body that are beyond control.  

It's really the mind that humans have the power over, not the inverse as this society seems to think, as even the smallest headache is treated as taboo here. The ladies are on their way to the bank, and there are two commercial assistants in Erewhon, one of which appeals to the imagination, and all transactions are accompanied with music, thus called musical banks, even though the music is horrible to European ears. So what do you guys think about the musical banks?  

JM:  

It was kind of cool. I kind of liked that, I guess. It was a weird touch. I really don't know why he associates music with banks, but I don't know if that was something... Maybe when Butler went to the bank to withdraw some money, he heard Handel in his head?  

Nate:  

Yeah, I think Handel does fit in here somewhere, as he...  

Gretchen:  

Well, if the music is horrible, perhaps it's Bach.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right.  

Gretchen:  

Perhaps it's Bach that's being played at the musical bank.  

Nate:  

I mean, he describes the music as some kind of complex, grammar, tonal, like Chinese, so maybe that's just what he felt about Bach, as opposed to the slow and stately movements of Handel.  

JM:  

It also reminded me of this comedy show that used to be on the CBC in the early 90s called Radio Free Vestibule . They had this little short sketch of a guy that has a radio series, right? So it was a guy going into a store or something and going, "can I have the sound of putting money into a cash register". And then you hear... "And here's the sound of an item being placed into a bag".  

Nate:  

Also that great Monty Python sketch, "The Money Programme", or whatever it is.  

 JM:  

Yeah, right.  

Nate:  

But I think Handel also comes in here as he is directly comparing the musical banks with the church, and Handel obviously fits into that. And at first I didn't know where he was going with this musical bank stuff, but then he gets in the church, and he's like, oh, okay, fine.  

Gretchen:  

It is very funny that the narrator himself is linking profit with religion here as well, which is very funny.  

JM:  

So I couldn't really tell how much of the narrator was Butler, right? So I don't know. I mean, there are certain cases where it seemed like he was, and then there's a certain amount of ambivalence about religion, like even though he wants to convert everybody.  

Nate:  

And I think there's just so much mixed messaging from Butler himself.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, I do feel like maybe perhaps the narrator is supposed to be someone Butler is including in his criticism, but that kind of takes a backseat when he gets into the chapters in Erewhon, and then he brings it in during the beginning chapters, and then the end is criticizing him. But yeah, the narrator is not important really during these moments when we're looking at the Erewhon society. He's just experiencing it.  

Nate:  

Yeah, and this particular bit in comparison to the church, he's basically saying that there's two kinds of banking systems here. This ridiculous, elaborate musical bank system that basically just produces toy money, and then there's like the real banking system that is the only one that should be there. That's the actual currency.  

JM:  

Yeah, and you know what? I kind of felt what he was getting at here because he was like, these Erewhonians are ridiculous. Why don't they just have a single currency, right? But then you look at like society, right? And you kind of see what's underpinning everything and how people who are questing after money, and then you have these like symbolic objects that represent now what is the true money, which is not something that anybody really sees. You know what I mean? It's kind of weird. It feels a little bit ahead of its time, I guess, in a way. So yeah, I don't know. I kind of got that, I think.  

Nate:  

It ties into some of the ideas with the German Protestant Reformation, I think Henry VIII telling the Pope off and declaring himself the Pope and all that is a bit different of a Protestant Reformation. But Butler's getting at the same kind of idea where it's not the pomp and the circumstance and the gorgeous Gothic architecture of the church as important as the actual, the faith and the good works and the good deeds and everything else. The flashy show stuff is just that, just flashy show. So yeah, that's kind of where he's going with all this. It's not really clear at first, but then he just kind of spells it all out.  

JM:  

So I do think like perhaps the religious side of this satire doesn't stand the test of time as well as some of the other stuff because yeah, I don't know. It doesn't really play as much of a role in most of our Western lives anymore, I guess, in that sense.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

There were a lot of other things he's kind of getting out to in this with like the banking system and currency and stuff that that's kind of still rings true.  

Nate:  

Yeah, definitely. Especially with the cryptocurrency stuff we have nowadays.  

Gretchen:  

I was going to bring up cryptocurrency. I was going to say, I wonder how Butler would feel about that.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

All the true currency is crypto, whether it's called that or not.  

Nate:  

Right, right. That's every less blocks of gold, I guess, aren't much better. But yeah, so that's the musical banks. So then we get introduced to Arowhena. I guess the female form of Erewhon, I guess.  

JM:  

Not a reverse name this time.  

Nate:  

No, it's not.  

JM:  

No, but if you look at it that way, I guess it kind of is. She is his justification for claiming that Erewhon is his destiny and nobody else's.  

Nate:  

Right, yeah. So we'll see what happens with her later. And again, this is a character he could have interacted with more, but she just kind of pops in and out of the narrative and they'll work and have an adventure.  

JM:  

And she doesn't say a word at the end. She should be kind of questioning the wisdom of what they're doing, flying up in a balloon and all that. So anyway.  

Nate:  

So she's the youngest daughter, and she's pretty much the perfect woman. So she runs all the errands. She's kind. She's thoughtful, graceful, and beautiful, and just does everything in a way that the narrator likes. And he doesn't really like any of these other people here.  

But he gets introduced to the Royal Court. The King is very much interested in this pocket watch he brought. And if such dangerous machines are tolerated in his home country, he is very hesitant to talk about high technology, the steam engines, railroads, and electric telegraphs, and instead tries to say that hot air balloons are the highest form of technology they have. And the King does not believe him.  

JM:  

This also kind of reminded me of our last episode where we were talking about viking guy's daughter in "The Man Who Came Early", and how the guy was telling him about all his technology and machines, and she's all in trance by it. But in the end, it pretty much comes to nothing, because it's not like he can go back there and he gets killed instantly anyway. And she's just bitter forever afterwards. I feel like, cool, I understand. This is a book that he possibly might have read at some point and been pretty contemptuous about. I can't think of a machine philosophy. He's totally antithetical to the way I think somebody like him would think.  

Nate:  

Yeah. But the King feels that he's bluffing, but is acting polite anyways. So they return to family affairs here. The narrator wants to marry Arowhena, and he's expected to marry the other daughter, though, Zulora, as he can't stand her. The family are devotees of the goddess Ydgrun. The religion in general is an idolorous worship.  

JM:  

He should have tried to steal Mrs. Nasnibor instead.  

Nate:  

Right.  

JM:  

Then they could have staged like the graduate or something like that.  

Nate:  

Yeah. But the religion is not like Christianity. It's idolatrous worshiping of gods in human form, the personifications of justice, strength, hope, fear, love, etc. And these gods are quite wrathful when neglected, which is how they frame their accidents. Being in the same place as another object in the same time is absolutely forbidden. You are underwater for too long, you anger the air god, etc. So all these kinds of ways you can harm yourself are framed as interactions with various gods and displeasing them.  

The narrator gets in an argument with Arowhena over the existence of these gods. Generally speaking is never a good idea, but she does allow herself to be baptized though, so a minor victory for the missionary.  

JM:  

Conversion, hungry.  

Gretchen:  

I do like her questioning at one point because she's like, isn't your god basically like an idealization of how good humans should be? He kind of doesn't have an answer for her and rushes that off.  

Nate:  

Yeah, he actually says, a passage I want to read here, he says, "I own that she very nearly conquered me once for she asked what I should think if she were to tell me that my god, whose nature and attributes I had been explaining to her, was but the expression for man's highest conception of goodness, wisdom and power, that in order to generate a more vivid conception of so great and glorious a thought, man had personified it and caught by a name, that it was an unworthy conception of the deity to hold him personal and so much as escape from human contingencies became thus impossible, that the real thing men should worship was the divine, where and so ever they could find it, that God was but man's way of expressing his sense of the divine, that as justice, hope, wisdom, et cetera, were all parts of his goodness. So God was the expression which embraced all goodness and all good power, that people would no more cease to love God on ceasing to believe in his objective personality than they had ceased to love justice on discovering that she was not really personal. Nay, that they would never truly love him till they saw him thus."  

Her words haunt him as they try to convince one another, and despite this apparent conviction, the narrator can't help but think it's all superficial. The priests are often complaining about indifference. Ydgrun is sometimes seen as an enemy of the gods, and at times shameful, often denied by her very worshippers. But she still plays a central part in the society of Erewhon and will make any conversion to Christianity difficult.  

And this whole Ydgrun bit is Butler talking about conformity and the social order and its relation to organized religion. Some are more sincere in their faith and devotion than others. The high Ydgrunites, not making a show out of it. And the narrator likes them and feels bad they're all going to hell.  

JM:  

Yeah.  

Nate:  

If he fails to convert them, it might be worth sending a few trained missionaries to get the job done. He finds it strange there is this conflict between high Ydgrunism and the other personified deities. There are some more slightly tedious religious musings as he gets into arguments, though he does translate a bit of "Hamlet" for them, so that's pretty cool they're getting some Shakespeare.  

The Erewhonians believe in pre-existence and that an unborn spirit consciously wills itself into the world.  

JM:  

Yeah, this part was very strange for sure. It's like this almost little horror story inside Erewhon where it's like, wait, so we're all actually suicides from a previous world and they get injected with a psychic drug that makes them forget everything about their past existence and become babies dependent on families that don't like them. That's horrible! Wow, yeah. I wasn't expecting it to go there and as usual with Butler, he kind of is very dry about it and just kind of like implies everything and doesn't really like the story is not about that, so it's just another idea that he brings up. But it just so, I don't know, it's this weird almost semi-gnostic thing that comes out of, I don't quite know. I guess, again, he's making some kind of comment about childhood and education like, I don't know, I don't quite... It was a cool concept, it was a cool unsettling concept but I don't quite grasp what it meant to him, you know what I mean? Sort of disconnected in my head because it's just a cool concept and nothing else.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, even though it seems a little disconnected from the other more social satire concepts, I did like this, this was probably one of the most interesting concepts for me from the book. I just thought it was so bizarre and kind of, like I said, it's so funny in some ways because they're talking at one point about how there's a whole ceremony where they yell at the baby for being born until it starts crying, which of course a baby would do and then they're like, it's the admission of guilt that they're crying because they feel so bad about what they've done and it's kind of, it's so funny in it's absurdity.  

JM:  

Yeah, and you put it like that, it is kind of funny because I mean, I was just thinking, oh, it's horrible, right? But like, yeah, because...  

Gretchen:  

I mean, it is horrible in some way, but it's kind of like, that's what makes it kind of amusing.  

JM:  

Yeah, because it's like the parents are like, oh, we know what you are, we know what you're really all about and the baby's just like (baby scream)...  

Nate:  

Yeah, he's definitely imparting some early childhood trauma on this part, I think. Maybe he heard some less encouraging words from his parents. But the imagery is really cool and it ties into a lot of the spiritualist stuff, which I don't think was Butler's thing at all, but again, I think it's more American.  

JM:  

It seems to be, because this is all like transmigration of souls and all that. But again, like the parents know, but the baby, the baby's soul is new, so it doesn't know, right? So again, the baby's not responsible for being born, and so you shouldn't treat your young people like crap, I guess, is basically what he's getting at. He's like talking about baby's born in unfortunate circumstances, maybe especially like his, how he views his anyway, maybe, because he's a bit sorry for himself or whatever, right? But I mean, his principle in general stands, right?  

Gretchen:  

I hope my dad that sent me to New Zealand reads this.  

Nate:  

Yeah, definitely a lot of father issues. And the way he describes how the actual process works, the unborn spirits fly around the various married couples and essentially plague and torment them until the child is conceived, I guess. And the birth formula is the written word of the child itself as soon as it's born, which give the parents indemnity from all responsibility on the score of his birth and asserting its own pre-existence, which is drafted up by lawyers and printed varying to social class on different kinds of paper. The rich have a much more elaborate one. A common clause you might find in one of these birth formulas is, "he did with malice afterthought, set himself to plague and pester two unfortunate people who had never wronged him and who were quite contented and happy until he conceived his base design against their peace, for which wrong he now humbly entreats their pardon."  

I mean, yeah, a lot of baggage here with Butler. I mean, it even acknowledges the parents have the right to kill them and implores the parents that they spare the child. There's a ceremony the third or fourth day after the birth where the friends of the parents console them for the horrible loss they've experienced. So the child actually signs this contract at the age of 14, the family straightener being their guide through life at this point.  

Gretchen:  

And they sort of either bribe or threaten the child into doing it.  

Nate:  

Pretty much, yeah.  

JM:  

Interesting, very bold way of going about things. And again, I guess it's an interesting way of showing the mirror image of a society that he feels that he's a part of. So I don't know, it's really interesting the way he tries to portray that. And it's a weird slant. And the whole time you as a reader might be swayed by being influenced by the protagonist going, oh, that's weird. I couldn't make any sense of it, right? The main character is not saying like, oh, this is a satire of English culture, but you know when you're reading it that that is that.  

Nate:  

Yeah. So he's discussing all this with one of the professors at the College of Unreason, who says that the translation from unborn thought to human language is always going to be imperfect, but that compromise is necessary. And the sooner the child understands his, I guess, spiritual manifestation in the form of this contract, the better. So the narrator has given a book of the mythology of the unborn and will excerpt some text. And the Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards, or again, that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor. So there's some musings on time, the past, the present, future, looking back at things with foresight, et cetera. Some accounts of people who thought they knew the future. After some chapters, it does get to the unborn. They're pure souls without bodies, but who do live somewhere, and them entering the mortal world is a form of suicide from the spiritual world. And they live in enlightened state above mankind. They're still jealous of having a physical, corporeal body, and there's some formal process done through the spiritual magistrate of entering into one.  

A potion destroys their memory and identity, so they enter the world afresh. And some of the wiser lecturers say that being born is a capital crime, a felony of the highest order. That child-rearing is a major hindrance, and there's so many wasted years in the beginning of acquiring knowledge.  

JM:  

I don't really get, like he describes at the beginning how fecund and the Erewhonians are, because they're so healthy, right? But they also hate bearing children, so there's no birth control, I guess, and they just do it and deal with the misery, I suppose, that they feel. Because they know that.  

Nate:  

It's all quite strange.  

Yeah, so the soul needs to accept these terms and conditions before the magistrate, before the potion is administered. And this is just a tiny fragment of the mythology, and the narrator feels this a very unfair view on life.  

No Erewhonian believes that life is this grim, another testament to them not really believing in the stuff he professed to. The birth formula really isn't invoked, except under extreme circumstances, yet familial affection is nowhere near as common as it is in Europe. Many of the children go to the schools of unreason, which their Ydgun worship requires, often rendering them useless. The narrator believes that reading, writing, and arithmetic is all that's necessary, and that one shouldn't overdo it with overworking the pupil.  

Butler obviously had a rough time in his boarding school days, so he's getting a bit off of his chest here with the education system. He says, "much as some are doing with women's rights in England, a party of extreme radicals have professed themselves unable to decide upon the superiority of age or youth, which is a threat to the social order."  

He says that the object of education should be to keep the old young as long as possible, others say the young should be allowed to inflict corporal chastisement on the old, which here is defined as 35 plus.  

The Nasnibors want to keep the narrator with them and not let him take out his own apartment, while meanwhile he's awkwardly flirting with Arowhena. Marriage to her would be frowned upon there, so as largely out of the question, one option would be to take her back to Europe, but that is fraught with difficulties.  

JM:  

But not that many difficulties.  

Nate:  

No, no. And I guess we might see that later.  

JM:  

It's just funny, like they're down on him and keeping him under surveillance, but he can still kind of do what he wants.  

Nate:  

Yeah, yeah. So after confessing his love, he arranges for them to meet again in secret, but the stress and mental anguish of all this is taking a physical toll on him. He's not able to conceal illness as well as the Erewhonians. The king has been pondering about the watch and wants to sentence him to the hospital for lying about the balloons.  

JM:  

He's being called out now. They're on the verge of canceling him because of his pocket watch.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right.  

JM:  

His times of glory are coming to an end.  

Nate:  

It's a very severe crime, which we'll see shortly. But here he's soon invited to the College of Unreason by one of the cashiers at the musical bank, which is at one of the principal towns. The narrator, however, is visibly looking unwell and his friends wanted to help him conceal it the best way possible. So they get off on the road and it's now spring, 10 months since he started his initial voyage, even though it feels like 10 years. The country air is quite refreshing and it's also refreshing for the reader out of the slight tedium of the last chapters to get out on the road and travel again. But it doesn't really last for that long, unfortunately.  

JM:  

Butler does a funny thing in this book that I now is going to try to point out as any, but,  close to the end of all his chapters. Maybe not every single one like especially not the adventurous ones in the beginning, but like in all the parts about Erewhon, he apologizes for boring the reader and for possibly making him lose his attention and so on. And he does this a lot, like it's not just once, you know. So it's like, what does he really think of his book?  

It's weird, like I guess we should let him off the hook because he's self-effacing, right?  

Nate:  

And even he admitted it has no plot.  

JM:  

There were times when I'm like, yeah, this is, it's a glimpse into Butler, the man, and he seems kind of like annoying a little bit sometimes.  

Nate:  

Yeah, so yeah, here we are getting to the College of Unreason, and here is where he really gets out his gripes on the education system. So a lot of the college is based around the concept of Hypothetics, which is that to teach a boy merely the nature of things which exist in the world around him, and about which he will have to be conversant during his whole life, would be giving him but a narrow and shallow conception of the universe, which his urge might contain all manner of things which are not now to be found therein.  

To open his eyes to these possibilities and so to prepare him for all sorts of emergencies is the object of this system of Hypothetics. To imagine a set of utterly strange and impossible contingencies and require the use to give intelligent answers to the questions that arise therefrom is reckoned to the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the actual conduct of their affairs in afterlife.  

There is even a hypothetical language, one perhaps along the lines of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, which I believe was popular at the time, and it's an academic exercise that translates verses into this language, which the narrator feels is a complete waste of time.  

There are the professorships of inconsistency and evasion who contribute more to this useless knowledge that has no practical application in the real world. Reason, of course, might change things like the double banking system, though, and they can't have any of that. There isn't much difference between a genius and an idiot, and the narrator had to eat his words when talking about free thought.  

The college's duty isn't to encourage free thought, but to ensure conformity, and the narrator still can't get over the translation of poetry into the hypothetical language. I guess he just thinks it's such a waste of time, so I just kind of wonder what exercises he had to do in Cambridge, probably translating stuff into ancient Greek or whatever.  

Still, the city is beautiful, and even if hypothetics are useless and impossible to talk to, the narrator thinks them more dead than alive. It is here where he learns about the revolution which resulted in the destruction of the machines, which took place 500 years ago. The Civil War had wiped out half the population. It is between the machinists and the anti-machinists.  

200 years ago, all the machines had long been removed and reduced to a curiosity of ancient times, and the narrator will now provide a translation of the account.  

So here we finally are, "The Book of the Machines", the reason that we're all here. So I'd definitely like to run through its arguments and give some quotes from it.  

Throughout "The Book of the Machines", the narrator makes it a point to comment on the author's frequent digressions and tangents. "The Book of the Machines" itself starts off with some discussion of evolution. The earth once started as a superheated ball of rock, but then at some point consciousness came along in some form of some animal life.  

It would appear that there are different stages of consciousness after all. The existence of a plant is different from that of an animal, which is different from that of a person. So what if there is another way that consciousness can manifest itself? So I want to read a quote from the book here, which says, "There is no security to quote his own words against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness. In the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now, a mollusk has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious things have existed for some 20 million years. See what strides machines have made of the last thousand. May not the world last for 20 million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and forbid them further progress?"  

So already an incredibly radical idea of this idea of perhaps mechanical life form evolving in the way that biological life did on earth. Obviously really inspired by Darwin, obviously familiar with Babbage and some of those calculator developments we were talking about earlier in the tech background.  

He gives several examples of various lower consciousnesses like a potato, saying "if it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operation. Whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of levers beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection and going up to the human arm in the appliances which it makes use of. Whether there not be a molecular action of thought, whether a dynamical theory of the passion shall be deductible, whether strictly speaking we should not ask what kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is his temperament. How are they balanced? How much of such and such will it take to weigh them down so much as to make them do so and so?"  

And I mean, this is just, I think, incredible. I mean, he had no idea of how many billions of synapses and neurons are in the human brain, or how many billions of transistors we would be able to fabricate on a microchip in 2023, but here he is talking about the exact same concepts.  

JM:  

It's pretty wild, and it's just buried in the middle of all this. Because it's written in that same style that Butler always has in this book, it's easy to kind of pass it by and be like, okay, but really it is pretty awesome. Like, it reminds me of so much later speculation, too. And I mean, it's clear that many writers of more recent science fiction have read this. What example that I think we've talked about before, of course, being Frank Herbert in the Dune series, and the so-called Butlerian Jihad, which was the revolt against machines and machine intelligences that takes place in the Dune universe, which explains why there are no computers in that entire series of books. At least until Brian Herbert, and what's his name, did some prequels where they include machine intelligences and stuff like that. But it's like Frank Herbert deliberately just wanted to set his future universe without that stuff. And so he basically said, well, there's only one world in the entire inhabited galaxy that's allowed to make machines of any real sophistication, and they sell it to everybody else. And that's how they make their commerce, but otherwise that kind of stuff is not allowed. And computers are definitely not allowed. And he called it the Butlerian Jihad in tribute to Samuel Butler. So this thing, as weird as it is, too, after this book was published, it was very popular, it seems. It was maybe not as popular as "The Coming Race", but it seems like it was fairly well read.  

Nate:  

Definitely, yeah. I mean, certainly enough where it was reprinted multiple times in his lifetime. I think he wrote like three different prefaces to it for the various editions.  

JM:  

And there's this sequel, which we'll talk about, right?  

But there is the prefaces to the three different editions that were published during his lifetime, one of which justifies the book by saying that he doesn't know anything about "The Coming Race" and has nothing to do with his book.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I guess what interesting thing about Frank Herbert "Dune" and the idea of human computers is that's one thing I didn't mention in the tech background is when in the early 20th century, it wasn't really possible to do computing on machine computers, what they would use was human computers who were overwhelmingly, if not entirely women, and basically hand them a bunch of ballistics tables and be like here, go calculate it, have fun.  

And they work in these huge factories as doing this manual computing work for several decades.  

It's kind of an interesting chapter in computing history, but it's kind of interesting how that plays out more in "Dune" than in here. But again, the idea of using people to do what machines have been designed to do and the event that machines may outpace human capability a little bit too much.  

JM:  

Right. And at the same time, it's like, again, the opposite way of looking at it. Well, if machines can do these things fast, humans should be able to as well. Right. You know, I mean, it's obviously impossible for a human brain to calculate the way a computer does, but that's like just part of the cool fantastic concept. Right. Yeah. These human computers, right. And human minds can still do remarkable calculating and stuff like that. I certainly can't. I suck in math.  

Nate:  

But I mean, the human brain processes information in a different way that a calculator or a computer would. A modern computer can run through, I don't know how many billions of mathematical operations per second. But yeah, it would have trouble interpreting a novel like "Erewhon", which we can do easily. So it's just interesting how information is processed in different ways.  

JM:  

Yeah, that is that is definitely really interesting. And that that is actually definitely at the heart of a lot of modern debates...  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Right now. And why artificial intelligence written novels are still not as good as the best well written human novels, but maybe between that and a bad novel, maybe you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.  

Nate:  

Right.  

JM:  

And I mean, who knows where the technology will be in again, 25, 35 years, as it's just evolving at an exponential pace. And maybe that won't be the case then, maybe.  

JM:  

Maybe not, that's scary to think about because I know I'm going to be conservative and I'm going to be like not accepting the first.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Outburst of conscious thought.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

In machine intelligence.  

Nate:  

Yeah. And this rapid pace of advancement in machine technology is something that the author of "The Book of the Mchines" that the narrator is translating for us gets into at this point and he says he doesn't fear any existing machines, but it's what to come that's really scary. And again, it's just amazing that this has a stem in 1863, whereas it's 160 years later, and what to come is still the scary part for us now. Because where is this going to lead? I mean, we've seen so many doomsday scenarios and science fiction. And it's just one way to take it would be the endpoint of humanity itself replaced by a superior functioning form of life. It's just kind of unsettling to think about what could happen and what may happen sooner than we think.  

JM:  

And what's going to be it's moral philosophy.  

Nate:  

Yeah. Will they replace man?  

And this is what again the book of the machine speculates on saying that machines like telescopes can already see better than man can calculators can already process sounds with much greater speed and accuracy than man can even in the 1860s. And that even if machines don't gain the level of proficiency and speech, a machine's function will be in the service of man and their entire existence and purpose depends on such. But what if man becomes dependent on these machines and they're somehow destroyed and man has forgotten how to interact with the earth. I mean, like we got in the Poul Anderson, if technology just suddenly disappeared from our lives we're so dependent on computers, we're so dependent on the internet, we're so dependent on trucking and modern shipping industries to supply us our food, refrigeration, all this stuff that we take for granted. If all this went away, what would happen to mankind?  

JM:  

Yeah, and he even talks about that in the book.  

Nate:  

Yeah, it's crazy.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, what if we lack the tools to make the tools to make the tools.  

Nate:  

Yeah, and that's a sense of dependency on these machines, which exists at the time, even though they're nowhere near as complicated as they are now. They still had the telegraph which could transmit information at more or less the speed of light, communications networks were being formed. This was important for shipping of goods conducting business on the railroad, that kind of stuff, as well as the wartime movements we were seeing in the United States during the 1860s. A lot of kind of stuff was dependent on these machines in these new emerging technologies, even in the 1860s, 1870s, which today, now we see as a primitive time. But to the people living it, it was really quite advanced, especially in comparison with the earlier part of the 19th century.  

JM:  

Yeah, the railroads were definitely a huge thing.  

Nate:  

Absolutely, yeah.  

 Gretchen:  

I mean, the Industrial Revolution is going on it's just a huge boom of technology at that point.  

Nate:  

Yeah, and that's really where we start to see the pace increase exponentially. I mean, things kind of gradually, slowly progress through the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment. But once the steam engine comes along and big factories come along, I mean, it's just really, really fast from then to the present day. But as the machines become more complex and advanced, they also need to be upgraded in competition with other factory units using machines to give them an edge.  

And he starts musing on how much human labor will be required to maintain and run these machines just to keep the whole system going. As life forms require some kind of fuel or power source, machines and tools previously required human or animal power to run them. But now the steam engine and the possibility of them developing their own internal stomach and feeding mechanism arises.  

And then he gets into the idea of reproduction and if machines can produce, I mean, perhaps not by sexual reproduction, but by getting humans to do it for them. And while they can't reproduce asexually, that is generating the same type of machine from themselves, who's to say it can't happen in the future?  

JM:  

Yeah, more on that in a little bit.  

Gretchen:  

I was going to say that it's very reminiscent of something coming up.  

Nate:  

But I mean, again, it ties into the same kind of ethics debate of what we're having about AI these days. Can an AI create a copy of itself? Can it reproduce itself through the computer systems we have now? Again, very relevant 150, 160 years later.  

JM:  

And I guess too, it brings to life the concept of virtual space. Yeah, because the entity reproducing itself over as much of the virtual space as possible, right? It's really insane to think about.  

Nate:  

Yeah, and like Darwin and biology, the author of "The Book of the Machines" proposes a classification schema of how to sort all machines into various mechanical components. And there's a common ancestor proposed a unique common ancestor, like I guess the machines version of the Amoeba, as even tobacco pipes can evolve over time.  

There's some musings on physical laws and free will and how this relates to a will of one's own with the respect to the behavior of a machine. Machines can't stop for themselves and have a limited range of movement capabilities compared to that of a life form. But is this not compared to primitive life forms like an oyster?  

Man's reliance on steam power is already to the point where removing it would mean a complete disruption of society, including a possible collapse. And it eventually may reach the point where a machine surpasses man and treats man like man treats the work beast.  

The conveniences that machines may bring to man are not worth being superseded over, the author believes. And thus, all mechanical progress should halt immediately. This leads to the attack, which destroys all mechanical machinery in Erewhon.  

JM:  

Yeah, so there's a whole story we're not hearing there about how he became a prophet and had all kinds of visions and they came to pass. And his people were like, yay, we must destroy the machines. There's a whole drama happening here that Butler and the author of "The Book of the Machines" don't quite let us see. It's like it's cool speculation to think about how this may have gone, but in the end, yes. They acquiesce somewhat easily, it seems, unless you imagine those kind of dramas. I imagine even there were things that we had read from around this time, like even "Symzonia", which talk about massive wars and great engines of destruction and stuff. We didn't really go into any of that.  

It's very dry, I guess, and not quite, but it's cool to imagine. You can do that. It's kind of reminiscent in that way of "Last and First Men" by Stapledon. There's just so much happening that is just being described in a very general way to you. And you have to kind of imagine how it might have really played out in the scenario of the world.  

Nate:  

Yeah. Unfortunately, the novel we get here is not the novel of this story. And that would have been cool if that's what we got, the civil war of the machinists versus the anti-machinists with all the mechanical consciousness philosophy informing the background and having characters interacting with each other and drama and all that. But unfortunately, it's dry.  

JM:  

And it'd be like now they would say, oh, it's a Skynet trying to take over. We have to stop them.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

So there's basically germination of that kind of story in this "Book of the Machines", which is really cool.  

Nate:  

Yeah, absolutely.  

JM:  

When you think about it.  

Nate:  

Yeah. And unfortunately, we don't get too much of that. But we are treated to more philosophical discussion about the nature of machines. The author of "The Book of the Machines" believes that machine should be looked upon as a limb, an extension of man, like a shovel or a prosthesis or something like that.  

JM:  

It's like now we have cyborgs.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right. Yeah. So this kind of feeds into the schema of horsepower as being the measurement of a man's wealth in Erewhon, which is a philosophical concept that really got into too much in the novel. It just kind of appears here and there.  

JM:  

No. And it seems weird that the Erewhonians would like that. Yeah. Because it does kind of feel machine-like.  

Nate:  

Right.  

JM:  

But I don't know. I guess maybe it's like a leftover from the ancient past or something like that, right?  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Like measuring something in horsepower. I don't know. Like maybe, yeah. So you didn't really foresee that. I mean, even much, much later on, we were still measuring engine speed at horsepower. So yeah, that's interesting.  

Nate:  

Yeah, it is.  

But after this, the writer's ideas prevail and the machines are destroyed. Civil wars follow and the Erewhonians thus are a long-suffering people easily led. And the narrator will now describe some other revolutions.  

So that concludes "The Book of the Machines." But then we get this weird tangent and turn into the discourse on animal and vegetable rights, which is kind of out of nowhere. So what do you guys think about this part?  

JM:  

Yeah. I don't know. This was just so... After thinking about all those future machine scenarios that that coming to this and just being like really... I have to read this part now.  

Nate:  

Yeah.   

Gretchen:  

A little tacked on at the end where you're like, oh, I guess there's a little bit more to read about this before the escape. You can read through "The Book of Machines" and then... I think that there is something... I do think when we get into it where it's like people kind of going to the extremes in order to show how extreme other people are in their beliefs. There is kind of fun. Like the idea, oh, well, you think that we can't have any sort of meat products. Well, what if we decided that we shouldn't eat vegetables either? See how well you can survive then. And I think it is funny, but it is kind of just like a bit of a... After reading "The Book of Machines", it is kind of a slog compared to that.  

Nate:  

It is. Because he gets about it in this really roundabout way.  

JM:  

I do think the description of how... Well, you can get around the meat rule by saying that something died naturally and you just came across it.  

Gretchen:  

I like the idea of... I like the intense extreme increase in animal suicides after that book comes out. That is very funny.  

JM:  

Oh I just found this cow on the side of the road and she was dead. And it looked like she died like maybe 30 seconds before I showed up.  

Nate:  

It's the strangest thing, the cow ran right at the knife. I don't know what happened.  

JM:  

Yeah.  

Nate:  

So it's a weird turn on veganism. And it is vegan because he talks about the use of milk and eggs.  

But yeah, we get this old philosopher who again muses on all the animal rights stuff. It's wrong to kill our fellow creatures and it's wrong to kill our fellow men. And this comes from divine knowledge. So he eventually proposes a strict vegan diet. And again, like "The Book of Machines", this kind of becomes law. So again, we get this common disobedience with again, the animals becoming strangely suicidal, purposely seeking out the butcher's knife and dogs attacking farm animals randomly. One judge rules that it's fine to kill an animal in self-defense if you really have to.  

Gretchen:  

That cow went into a just homicidal rage and almost killed me. So...  

Nate:  

I know who could have prevented it. Yeah.  

I'm sure the court cases were very strange to listen to. But we don't really get too much detail into the proceedings there. He does tell us that this falls out of favor until a pestilence came around, again interpreted as an act of a wrathful god. So again, they bring the vegan thing back, but it doesn't last for that long.  

So the story is that related about a young man who's fallen ill before it was criminalized and then is given the shocking advice by a doctor to eat meat, which he begrudgingly does. However, he's caught by the authorities one night and hangs himself from a shame of breaking the law.  

So roughly 700 years after the death of the initial prophet, another philosopher appears, though bears no claim to divine will. He takes this idea one step further that through the microscope he argues that plants and animals have the same common ancestor and thus both connected with intelligence and that plants have demonstrated themselves to be remarkably clever. You know, they can secrete poisons, lay traps for their predators, and also harness useful insects. And there's some musings on the generational memory of plants and animals.  

Thus this professor says it's sinful to eat living vegetables, and only the fallen fruit or dead leaves should be consumed. This new puritism eventually dies out, but it's just one example of the absurd ways of life these ridiculous people will adopt.  

So while engaged in translating this stuff, the narrator receives a word that he is going to be tried for the measles, which, yeah, what a stressful situation to be in. As a pretense for being punished for introducing the watch back into society.  

So his plan is to leave with Arowhena in tow in a balloon, and he asks leave of the queen to have one constructed. I guess the royal family is not involved in this whole plot to try him. He of course doesn't tell him that he wants to escape, but rather he wants to ask the sky god a few personal questions.  

JM:  

There's not even like, well, what do you want that for? I guess they're just decadent at indulgence, maybe?  

Nate:  

Yeah, asking the sky god a few personal questions seems like a plausible enough reason to me. I mean if you believe that the god is a personification of the sky, why wouldn't you fly into the balloon and get a couple theological issues out of the way?  

So he meets Arowhena and tells her of the plan and bribes the required people to get supplies on board. They conceal her and they load up the balloon and they're off. The flight is cold and dreamlike, but they get above the clouds and over the ranges in a few hours. The balloon starts sinking, however, and they splash down into the ocean. After a few hours they resign themselves to drowning, but miraculously an Italian ship, of course it's the Italians, they come by and pick them up.  

The captain questions them about the siege of Paris to which he has no idea. Kind of interesting coincidence, but the siege of Paris has come up in a couple stories we've covered on the podcast before.  

JM:  

I'd also like to compare this to the balloon ride in "The War and the Air" and how crazy and fun that was, and how Wells, even in his perhaps more realistic oriented writing, was able to make a really entertaining adventure. And here it's just, yeah, whatever, we're up here in our beautiful balloon, not saying a word to each other. I'm worried about this and that and the other thing, so I'll throw down some ballast. It's just like, yeah, I don't know. He's not committing to the adventure thing at all.  

Nate:  

I think he must have got that out of the system at the beginning.  

Gretchen:  

By the end he just didn't have the energy to go into it, I guess.  

Nate:  

No, he's probably thinking to himself, I'm going to get this out of the way, and to the publisher.  

So, yeah.  

No idea about the siege of Paris, he's been gone for however many years. He represents himself to this captain as an English Lord and says that Arowhena is a Russian Countess, which is I guess a pretty bold gamble that nobody on board knows Russian because they'd be pretty instantly found out.  

But he claims that they were traveling with a larger party who had all drowned. And he keeps Erewhon a secret and marries Arowhena on board as there happened to be a clergyman there. And in returning to London, he learns that his mother has died. He had been long thought for dead and no one seems to celebrate his return. And he takes up his plan to convert the Erewhonians.  

JM:  

You know, this kind of reminds me too of the end of "Symzonia".  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

He comes back home and he thinks, oh I'm rich, everything's going to be great. And like, nobody's happened to see a man. It's shitty, basically.  

Nate:  

Yeah. So he believes to convert the Erewhonians, they should go with large parties of ships and forcibly ship them to Queensland, which would allow them to work the land and become Christian. He of course does not come up with this idea on his own, but gleamed it from something he saw in a newspaper excerpt of something similar that happened with the Polynesians.  

And in a post script, he hears of a Reverend William Habakkuk from the initial colony, the narrator's adventures began in, preaching about the discovery of the lost tribes of Israel. And this is an outrage. It's the narrator's discovery.  

JM:  

That's my thing!  

Nate:  

And of course, this Habakkuk is none other than Chowbok.  

JM:  

Yeah.  

Nate:  

So our friend comes back at the end. He's now stealing our narrator's ideas. I guess the baptism and rum went a long way.  

JM:  

Right. Oh, okay. Yeah. What happens in "Erewhon Rеvisited" then? Yeah, so. Because that's so sequel bait, but like I was saying earlier, the whole way it is at the end is so hilarious, because yeah, he's like, well if we can raise enough money, if you subscribe now, maybe we'll get to our goal and it's a plea.  

Nate:  

No, it's not an exaggeration. He does give a YouTube like and subscribe at the end of a novel.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

And don't forget to visit my Patreon.  

Nate:  

Yeah, right.  

Gretchen:  

Smash that like button.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

Gretchen:  

I found the lost tribe of Israel, not clickbait.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Let me convert and enslave the lost tribes of Israel.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

Gretchen:  

Support my GoFundMe.  

Nate:  

Giving some people some ideas here, I bet.  

So yeah, that's "Erewhon". So "Erewhon Revisited" appeared later in 1901. We're not going to be covering another podcast, so you guys can all rest easy. And I'm going to quote Mr. Harris here for a plot summary. So Harris says, "when contemplating a sequel, it occurred to Butler to ask himself what would likely to happen after his rather bourgeois hero, Mr. Higgs, as he in future calls him, left Erewhon in the balloon along with Arowhena as he did at the close of the earlier book. After considering the matter, Butler came to the conclusion that the whole affair would become a miracle. He takes Mr. Higgs and his readers therefore back to Erewhon to show them the revolutionary changes which have come about through belief in this one supposed miracle. Higgs finds that he has become the unworthy center of a complete religious system called sunchildism, and he arrives just in time to be present at the dedication of the new temple race in his honor to hear the sermon of Professor Hankey, Professor of worldly wisdom who had been chosen to preach on that memorable occasion. All this, of course, gives Butler many satirical opportunities at the expense of the established religions. And from this point of view, the book is more a religious polemic than anything else."  

So, yeah.  

JM:  

Well, that's a little bit disappointing, I think.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I mean, Butler claims there's more plot in it. I don't know. It just sounds like he's getting more gripes about religion off his chest. It doesn't really sound too appealing to me, but I guess if that's your thing, it's out there.  

JM:  

I thought maybe I would read it or start it or something, and I didn't really get to it. I was kind of interested in where it would go because it did seem, yeah, like, even though sequels were not as common then as they are now, it did seem like it was asking for a one in a way. And it just, at the same time, it also amuses me that Butler seemed to have been thinking, people must be wondering what happened with "Erewhon" after. Yeah. I figured that in a sequel, Chowbuck would play a big part in it, but so far he has not been mentioned at all.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I'm not sure. He might not. This was 1901 versus the 1872? Yeah, 1872.  

JM:  

1872, yeah, the year after "The Coming Race". Right, so pretty much a full 30 years almost after it was originally published.  

Nate:  

Yeah, and I guess it does tell you in a way that the book was somewhat successful because he decided to revisit it, right?  

Gretchen:  

See, I like the idea of "Erewhon" just ending with, like, that plea for subscription and nothing happening after that.  

JM:  

It just ends like that.  

Gretchen:  

I think conceptually that works.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

Gretchen:  

Like, as a concept where it's like here's this man who's so dead set on, like, well, I need money, give me money so I can go perform colonialism, and then nothing comes of it.  

Nate:  

And it's like really brutal colonialism.  

JM:  

Yeah.  

Nate:  

That he wants to do too, like, forcibly ship them chains to Queensland, like, presumably, like.  

JM:  

It's so weird, too. It's like, I thought you liked these people.  

Nate:  

Yeah, man.  

So, yeah, Butler's a weird guy. I know this wasn't the easiest one to get through, but it does have some interesting ideas in it. I definitely have a lot more fun talking about it than reading it sometimes.  

JM:  

Yeah, me too. Me too. I'm glad we did this. I will say that if I had done the summary, I would have probably, like, really, I don't know, mocked and glossed over a lot more of these things that are gone into with their thought systems and stuff like that. Like, it was just, this was a really fun discussion, but this is probably the book that I have liked least since, like, "Señor Nic-Nac" or something like that. Like, it was difficult to get through at certain points, just in terms of, I don't know, the satire was, it could have been funny. And I had to, my imagination certainly did a good amount of work, which is cool. I don't know. Nothing wrong with that. But Butler just doesn't have the, I don't know, like, this is compared a lot to "Gulliver's Travels", right? But I remember "Gulliver's Travels" being a hell of a lot more fun than this.  

Gretchen:  

It does feel almost when we were talking about the ending where it seems like Butler just doesn't want to commit to things. Because, even with the execution of, like, the other chapters, there are times when he'll be reading from, like, even "The Book of Machines" and he's like, I'm going to skip over this part. He just seems to even be uninterested in what he's saying.  

So, yeah, it's, I did like this conversation and it's one of those times where I think I like the work a little more now that I've discussed it, but it's still not one that I want to revisit.  

Nate:  

Yeah, I'm probably not going to read this again. Then if this sounds like your thing, go for it. Again, I would suggest, at the very least, reading "Book of Machines" because it's a fantastic discussion, even if it is a little dry in places. And even if it's frustrating that he didn't just, like, make that the novel and not this, like, weird travelogue of him getting his childhood gripes off his chest or whatever. But, yeah, incredibly early for the concepts.  

Gretchen:  

Yeah, I would also say, I think it's a picture, a child getting yelled at is like a four year old for being born. And I think that's the experience that I also got out of it.  

Nate:  

Yeah.  

JM:  

Yeah, I can imagine that.  

Nate:  

All right, so I think what do we got next? We'll take a quick break.  

JM:  

Yeah, so now that we've been to New Zealand, although the writer of the text would exist, we were not really in New Zealand at all. I think it's a perfect time to discuss an Australian's nightmare and an Austrian's comic farce.

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