Crystal Age, A (1888)
By W. H. Hudson
Adaptation; Evolution; Heredity; Nature/nurture; Utopia; Victorian
A botanist on an expedition finds himself wandering around a strange land with hyperintelligent animals and apparently ageless humans.
After a disorienting fall during an expedition, a botanist finds himself wandering a strange land peopled with eerily knowing animals and preternaturally preserved humans. Because these humans look morphologically similar to himself and can speak English, the narrator is initially considered a gauche, disoriented wanderer who has merely forgotten the rules of the land. This community, like other isolated communities, is the product of the destruction wrought by too much knowledge and accumulated wealth: in an earlier age, humans’ attempts to control Nature and mine it for answers led to a widespread contamination that wiped out the majority of the species. This community survived because of its relative isolation, and has continued to survive because it developed a communal relationship with the environment. The plow mules, for instance, do not need prodding to perform their duties, and seem to reprimand the narrator when he forgets to quit his duties for the day. Yet this community raises more questions than its relationship to the environment: the narrator notices that the men and women are nearly indistinguishable in appearance, that the people are much older than they appear and that the community boasts only one elderly man and no children. Because he cannot read their writings, and can glean very little from the citizens about their past, he must turn to the woman he loves and her suffering mother for answers. When he finally can read their language, he is horrified to learn that these people are essentially barren, and that like her siblings, Yoletta can experience nothing more than platonic love for him. Before he reads the entire prophecy relating to the community, he drinks a deadly potion, and learns too late that his fate was actually to help repopulate the community with his and Yoletta’s offspring.
One aspect of human evolution that the narrator demonstrates is a desire to belong to a communal lifestyle; while his hosts seem foreign to him at first, he soon desires more than anything to conform to their habits and appearance. He cannot fully adapt, however, falling back on his learned habits of overwork to the point of making himself ill; the communal response – to punish him for not caring for his health – indicates the significance of the individual to the whole species. This is a communal environment, and its survival relies largely upon its collectivity. The size and isolation of this group calls into question contemporaneous desires to populate and colonize the globe; is a world teeming with a variety of people any more content than this limited society? Hudson is clearly questioning the benefits of scientific developments emerging during his lifetime: as scientists attempt to plumb “living animal tissues” for answers, they expose humanity to both the benefits and dangers to be learned within. Rather than attempting to learn new means of improving the species, this text seems to recommend a return to the nature humankind is attempting to exploit.
Evaluation: This is a utopian fantasy, in the vein of the spate of Victorian utopian novels produced concurrently. This novel delves more into the interconnectedness of humans and nature than some of its counterparts, and its connection to genetics is more subtle.
– Natalie Champ