In a faraway land, a traveler encounters a peculiar, topsy-turvy society in which sickness is a punishable crime and crime is an illness for which criminals receive compassionate medical treatment. The English church is ridiculed as a "musical bank," which deals with a currency nobody believes in but which everyone pretends to value. University instructors teach courses on how to take a long time to say nothing, and machines are banned for fear they will evolve and be the masters of man. First published in 1872, Erewhon (an anagram for "nowhere") is perhaps the most brilliant example of...

Written between 1873 and 1884 and published posthumously in 1903, The Way of All Flesh is regarded by some as the first twentieth-century novel. Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical family's domestic life. It also foreshadows the crumbling of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals in the aftermath of the First World War, as well as the ways in which succeeding generations have questioned conventional values. Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human...

This book essentially restated the argument of Life and Habit, stating that human variation, or 'progress', is due to 'strokes of cunning - to a sense of need, and to study of the past and present which have given shrewd people a key with which to unlock the chambers of the future'. Butler believed that heredity was a mode of memory, and instinct was inherited memory. A world shaped by natural selection appeared to Butler to be 'a world of chance and blindness', which he simply could not accept, and he seized on what he saw as the wilful aspect of the Lamarckian mechanism of evolution to...