Hermes (pseud., ?Benjamin Lumley) Another World:

or, Fragments from the star city of Montalluyah
London, Samuel Tinsley, 1873.

First edition. 8vo. Original brown cloth ruled in black and lettered in gilt.

An intriguing work of speculative fiction, set in the city and planet of Montalluyah, strongly hinted to be Mars, wherein resides a highly civilised society whose inhabitants grapple with the same concerns as Victorian progressives: public health, education, crime prevention, the art of government. The twist is that they’ve largely solved them, principally through electricity, which here serves as a universal agent for everything from anaesthesia to disease detection. Physicians are the aristocracy; there are no poor; microscopy and breath analysis replace the doctor’s bag. The chapters on education and madness are perhaps the most compelling, particularly the counterintuitive finding that mental illness originates not in overworked regions of the brain but in those left dormant. The book sits slightly awkwardly between imaginative fiction and social satire, akin in ambition to Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.