Erewhon

Erewhon, or Over the Range is a novel by the English writer Samuel Butler, published anonymously in 1872, its title a near-anagram of nowhere. Narrated by a young colonist, Higgs, who crosses a remote mountain range in an unnamed British colony resembling New Zealand, the novel describes his discovery of the isolated country of Erewhon and his life among its people, whose customs systematically invert or distort those of Victorian England as a vehicle for satire: physical illness and misfortune are treated as crimes to be punished, while actual crimes such as theft or violence are treated sympathetically as diseases requiring medical treatment, and the country's Musical Banks, an elaborate institution that everyone patronizes out of social obligation while its currency is understood by all to be worthless, satirizes the empty formal observance Butler saw in the established church. A lengthy central section, the Book of the Machines, presents Erewhonian philosophers' arguments that machines, like living organisms, are subject to a kind of Darwinian evolution and might eventually surpass and even enslave humanity, leading the Erewhonians to destroy nearly all mechanical devices centuries before Higgs's arrival; the passage is widely cited as an early and unusually prescient literary treatment of what would later be called artificial intelligence. Higgs eventually escapes Erewhon by hot air balloon with the Erewhonian woman Arowhena, and the novel closes with his scheme to have the country colonized and its people Christianized, a proposal whose absurdity underscores the satire. Erewhon established Butler's reputation as a satirist and a critic of Victorian complacency about religion, science and progress.