SAJ contributors Mike Jay and Gary Lachman are amongst the disembodied voices discussing the joys of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Vril in this recent BBC Radio 3 documentary presented by Matthew Sweet.
Matthew Sweet finds out about Vril, the infinitely powerful energy source of the species of superhumans which featured in Victorian author and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton’s pioneering science fiction novel The Coming Race. Although it was completely fictional, many people were desperate to believe it really existed and had the power to transform their lives. With a visit to Knebworth House, Lytton’s vast, grandiloquent Gothic mansion, where Matthew meets Lytton’s great-great-great-grandson, and hears how his book was meant to be a warning about technology, soulless materialism and utopian dreams. At London’s Royal Albert Hall, he discovers how a doctor, Herbert Tibbits, along with a handful of aristocrats, tried to promote the notion of electrical cures and the possibility of a ‘coming race’. Along the way, Matthew and his contributors consider why so many English people have been so desperate to see the fantasy of regeneration transformed into fact.
Available here until 11 January 2009.