Puneet Varma (Editor)

The Social War

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An Entirely New Feature of a Thrilling Novel: Entitled, The Social War of the Year 1900; Or, Conspirators and Lovers. A Lesson for Saints and Sinners is an American utopian novel by Simon Mohler Landis, published in 1870 and adapted as a play in 1873. Commercially unsuccessful, it has been noted for its lack of literary merit and the repugnance of the ideas it advances.

Contents

Author

Simon Mohler Landis (d. 1902) was a clergyman from Pennsylvania, pastor of the "First Progressive Church of Philadelphia" which he founded in 1865. Frequently bankrupt, he made a living through lectures and by selling inventions such as the "Patent Compound Male and Female Magnitude Syringe and Organic Bath". He styled himself a doctor, although there is no evidence that he ever received this academic degree.

An Entirely New Feature is his only work of fiction. He also wrote a sexual education book, A Strictly Private Book on Marriage: Secrets of a Generation (1870), on account of which he was prosecuted for obscenity and jailed for five months. He recounted this trial in Prison Life Thoughts (1872) and remonstrated in publications against self-abuse, free love and doctors.

Content

Written in turgid, bombastically emotional prose, An Entirely New Feature combines, according to E. F. Bleiler's review in Science-fiction, the early years, "lurid sensationalism and sexual elements with a nasty messianic urge", thereby continuing the American Gothic tradition of George Lippard. Its plot consists of "a repetition of the same incident over and over, the kidnapping and physical abuse of the hero and heroine", but, in short, proceeds as follows:

Victor Juno, the novel's hero, leads the "Naturalists", a militant secret society, and as a preacher heals sickness through animal magnetism instead of medicine. He and his sweetheart Lucinda are opposed by doctors, organized religion and an odd assortment of "Conspirators". Civil war ensues, which the Naturalists win. They shoot all prisoners of war and institute a totalitarian theocracy, decreeing that all must work on pain of death, all money is to be collected by the state, "medicines, fashions and all artificial and useless things must be abolished instantly", and so forth. God eventually approves this state of affairs by sending a plague and famine in which all the wicked perish, leaving only the Naturalists to exult in "the work of God and man".

Reception

Judging by the few printed copies that remain, An Entirely New Feature did not sell well. Landis adapted the novel as a five-act play in 1873, but there is no record of it having been performed.

Reviewing it in 2012 in io9, Jess Nevins characterized the work as "the worst science fiction novel of the 19th century", outstripping all other bad science fiction of that time in "unreadability, cliché, and thematic foulness". E. F. Bleiler, after summarizing the novel's ludicrous plot, merely asks: "Is comment necessary?"

References

The Social War Wikipedia