Edward Bulwer Lytton

The Coming Race (1871) Published Anonymously by Edward Bulwer Lytton

The Coming Race is an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, reprinted as Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. Among its readers have been those who believed that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called "Vril" was accurate, to the extent that some theosophists, notably Helena Blavatsky, William Scott-Elliot, and Rudolf Steiner, accepted the book as being (at least in part) based on occult truth. A book, The Morning of the Magicians (1960), suggested that a secret Vril Society existed in pre-Nazi Berlin. However, there is no evidence for the existence of such a society. The Coming Race was published anonymously in late 1871, but Bulwer-Lytton was known to be the author. Samuel Butler's Erewhon was also published anonymously, in March 1872, and Butler suspected that its initial success was due to it being taken by many as a sequel by Bulwer-Lytton to The Coming Race. When it was revealed in the 25 May 1872 edition of the Athenaeum that Butler was the author, sales dropped by 90 percent because he was unknown at the time