David Seed provides concise insight with reference to the many themes touched upon and often pioneered in The Coming Race, and goes on to examine them from divergent perspectives. Among these are; utopian themes, automata and the loss of individualism, theosophy to Nazism, Darwinian themes, gender politics, and central to the novel, vril: the life force. Vril is to Bulwer-Lytton what the Force is to George Lucas, and could well be the source of inspiration for whoever Lucas borrowed from when he reimagined the idea in Star Wars. Vril, astonishingly for its day and age, also permeated into real life in a number of ways. Most commercially as part of the name for the beef extract drink, Bovril. Vril, is a mysterious, vital force, which under the command of a skilled practitioner, can do all that was ascribed to the Force, and much more.

The Coming Race tells the story of an English gentleman who undertakes a private exploration with a friend below a deep mineshaft, and accidentally falls into a subterranean world. This is a place inhabited by communities of an advanced race named the Vril-ya, various monsters, and sub-races of savages. How the Vril-ya react to their visitor from the surface, and what he learns from them is presented using language, forms of expression and perspectives which, from a modern day viewpoint can seem rather quaint. However, it's always worth persevering, as The Coming Race is a work that, with twenty-first century hindsight, is of equal importance to better known classics such as Frankenstein or The Time Machine. Years before H.G. Wells popularised the term 'Scientific Romance,' Bulwer-Lytton was describing his own work as "perhaps a romance but such a romance as a Scientific amateur... might compose." Like many of his contemporaries, Bulwer-Lytton used his fiction as a means of intellectual speculation, and in the case of The Coming Race, pioneered fiction that dealt with the Earth's vast, unknown interior, where the dark and obscure subterranean world is used as a metaphor to discuss the uncertain destiny of humanity. In the Vril-ya, we see the forerunners of every alien or more than human race, with whom humankind was to find itself compared, and against whom we might one day be pitted. It also poses a number of subtle questions concerning what is really desirable progress, and what might only seem to be superior.

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is best know today from Snoopy's use of his line "It was a dark and stormy night," from the novel Paul Clifford, but the depth and span of his imagination makes him someone that any inquiring fan of science fiction should read, at least once. The idea around which The Coming Race is based may appear hackneyed to some, but its intrinsic qualities have enabled it to stay in print, more than a century after the author's death. Grab a copy now, and enjoy the days of future passed.