Sub-Coelum
| Author | Addison Peale Russell |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre |
Speculative fiction Utopian fiction Belles-lettres |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
|
Publication date
|
1893 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 267 pp. |
Sub-Coelum: A Sky-Built Human World is an 1893 utopian fiction written by Addison Peale Russell. The book is one volume in the large body of utopian, dystopian, and speculative literature that characterized the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Scholar of the genre Jean Pfaelzer has described Sub-Coelum as a "conservative utopia," a book written in reaction to the multiple radical implications of the utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy and similar writers. While some skeptics of utopianism responded with dystopian satires and parodies, others, like Russell, answered with speculative fictions of their own that defended more conservative values. (Pfaelzer places John Macnie's The Diothas and John Jacob Astor IV's A Journey in Other Worlds in the same category.)Sub-Coelum has been called "a protest against the materialistic and socialistic tendencies of the times."
Sub-Coelum has been termed a novel, for want of a better classification — though it is that unusual type of novel that has no plot or characters. It might more accurately be called a fantasy or a meditation on society and human affairs. The book is divided into 146 short chapters; most are a page or two in length. The style is sometimes elaborate and eloquently descriptive:
It can also be pithy and aphoristic: "Sarcasm was not often indulged, and only then between close friends." At some points the prose rises to a pitch of ecstasy or delirium:
Some critics complained about the book; a Yale reviewer noted its "vagueness and indefiniteness...." Russell's imagined land has been grouped with "Altruria, Equitania...or even Meccania" (the fantasy countries of William Dean Howells, Walter O. Henry, and Owen Gregory respectively).
Pfaelzer calls Sub-Coelum "an early behaviorist utopia...." There is much "individuality" in Russell's projected social order, but little privacy; the people are close observers of each other. Artists who offend are jailed. Russell places a high value on sexual restraint. "Purity, of all things, was most jealously guarded. The incorrigibly impure were locked up forever. Men and women, as to that, were treated alike by the police and by the courts." To obtain a marriage license, a couple must answer a long series of questions, under oath.
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