“[Butler showed] imagination of a very high order to see that machinery could be dangerous as well as useful.”
—George Orwell
Samuel Butler’s most critically acclaimed novel, Erewhon, or, Over the Range, is set in the fictional country of Erewhon, an anagram of “nowhere.” Butler crafts a mesmerizing narrative centered around a protagonist’s journey through this seemingly utopian society. Initially, Erewhon appears idyllic—a place where money holds prestige but lacks purchasing power and nature is unspoiled by machines, which are banned due to their perceived threat to survival. Yet, the protagonist soon uncovers layers of religious insincerity and institutional flaws that shatter the illusion of perfection. In this topsy-turvy world, disease is a cause for imprisonment and crime is treated as an illness. Erewhon is frequently compared to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in its satirical send-up of hypocritical society, but Butler goes further and does something altogether original in anticipating DNA testing and artificial intelligence—making Erewhon a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. In addition to George Bernard Shaw, who is widely considered his chief disciple, Butler influenced and inspired other writers, including Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, H. G. Wells, and Dorothy Richardson.
This volume reproduces the expanded and definitive edition of Erewhon issued in 1901. It also contains the full text of Butler’s article “Darwin among the Machines,” which provided the basis for his eerily prescient chapters on machine learning and consciousness, as well as a detailed biographical timeline.
Samuel Butler (1835–1901) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic whose satire Erewhon (1872) foreshadowed the collapse of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress and influenced every significant writer of utopian/dystopian fiction that followed. His autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903), is generally considered a masterpiece.
“Clarity and simplicity of style was his aim and he achieved it. He is one of the masters of English prose.”
—The Atlantic
