Koom-Posh, … is bad enough, still it has brains, though at the back of its head, and is not without a heart; but in Glek-Nas the brain and heart of the creatures disappear, and they become all jaws, claws, and belly.
Book 1871
The Coming Race quotes
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About the book
A young American exploring a mine falls into a vast world beneath the earth, home of the Vril-ya, a winged, highly advanced people who command vril, a single force that can heal, light, move machines or destroy. Living as a guest among them, he finds a society without war, crime, poverty or ambition, and slowly realises how uneasy its perfection makes him. One of the earliest science fiction novels, it mixes utopia, satire and a warning about a race more powerful than our own.
6 quotes
You see our serene mode of life now; such it has been for ages. We have no events to chronicle. What more of us can be said than that, ‘they were born, they were happy, they died?’
And yet, if you would take a thousand of the best and most philosophical of human beings you could find in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, or even Boston, and place them as citizens in the beatified community, my belief is, that in less than a year they…
Only, the more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in…
In fact, … if the wisdom of human life be to approximate to the serene equality of immortals, there can be no more direct flying off into the opposite direction than a system which aims at carrying to the utmost the inequalities and turbulences of mortals. ……
The fire lodged in the hollow of a rod directed by the hand of a child could shatter the strongest fortress, or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host. If army met army, and both had command of this agency, it could be but to the…