Erewhon (1872) - Samuel Butler

Written by Samuel Butler
Read by Michael Maloney
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

· Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
· Release date: 04-30-13
· Publisher: Audible Studios

SUBTITLED – Over the Range

The wittiest of Victorian dystopias by the period’s arch anti-Victorian. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand.

Assisted by a native, Chowbok, he makes a perilous journey across a mountain range to Erewhon (say it backwards), an upside-down world in which crime is “cured” and illness “punished”, where universities are institutions of “Unreason” and technology is banned. The state religion is worship of the goddess Ydgrun (ie “Mrs Grundy” – bourgeois morality). Does it sound familiar? Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there.

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are based on Butler’s own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–64), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and which he wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter “Book of the Machines”, with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.

This is not my rip but my chapter labels.