Meleager - A Fantasy
Early eugenics dystopia, 1916
Meleager: A Fantasy (1916) by Welsh writer Herbert Millingchamp Vaughan is an unusual early science fiction dystopia set mostly on a miniature version of Earth called Meleager. Framed as a discovered manuscript, the narrative follows a Londoner who has grown increasingly uneasy about the moral and aesthetic decline of modern life. He is approached by an ambassador from Meleager, whose people have long selected their kings from Earth, and is invited to leave his troubled world behind to rule theirs.
Once transported there, he becomes the ceremonial head of a society organized around the pursuit of "Universal Content," the principal aim of collective happiness. The novel maps the planet's geography, rituals, political institutions, and strict social hierarchy in considerable detail. The society appears harmonious, but depends on troubling measures to maintain its order: rigid gender segregation, the euthanizing of "malformed and idiotic infants," the deportation of the mentally ill and "seriously diseased," and a political structure in which real authority rests with a male-only Council of Seventy. The Earth-born king is revered with near-religious devotion while holding almost none of the power that devotion implies.
The juxtaposition of Earth and Meleager raises questions about how life should be governed, and the narrator's gradual acceptance of the mechanisms that sustain Meleagrian order is the novel's most unsettling element. When political tides shift and his position becomes precarious, the novel turns toward adventure: a plan to smuggle his manuscript back to Earth, an escape by spaceship, and a recapture by Meleagrian agents that ends with his return under promises of restored standing.
Rare and little studied, Meleager occupies a curious place in early speculative fiction, blending planetary romance with anxieties about modern progress. Its mixture of utopian rhetoric and eugenic practice anticipates concerns later taken up by writers such as Charlotte Haldane, Rose Macaulay, and Aldous Huxley. Whether Vaughan intended irony, ambivalence, or a sincere alternative vision is difficult to determine, but the result is a distinctly early twentieth-century fantasy in which neither world, Earth nor Meleager, offers a reassuring vision of what progress is for.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, red cloth binding with black lettering on spine and black borders on cover. Locke indicates two bindings, this being the cheaper of the two, and likely a later or export binding. London: Martin Secker, 1916. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p.218. ISBN: 9781333795177. #11361.
Two ownership signatures inside, page edges slightly soiled, but overall very good with the original dust jacket with darkened spine. The brittle jacket is separating along rear fold but amazingly still intact.
Once transported there, he becomes the ceremonial head of a society organized around the pursuit of "Universal Content," the principal aim of collective happiness. The novel maps the planet's geography, rituals, political institutions, and strict social hierarchy in considerable detail. The society appears harmonious, but depends on troubling measures to maintain its order: rigid gender segregation, the euthanizing of "malformed and idiotic infants," the deportation of the mentally ill and "seriously diseased," and a political structure in which real authority rests with a male-only Council of Seventy. The Earth-born king is revered with near-religious devotion while holding almost none of the power that devotion implies.
The juxtaposition of Earth and Meleager raises questions about how life should be governed, and the narrator's gradual acceptance of the mechanisms that sustain Meleagrian order is the novel's most unsettling element. When political tides shift and his position becomes precarious, the novel turns toward adventure: a plan to smuggle his manuscript back to Earth, an escape by spaceship, and a recapture by Meleagrian agents that ends with his return under promises of restored standing.
Rare and little studied, Meleager occupies a curious place in early speculative fiction, blending planetary romance with anxieties about modern progress. Its mixture of utopian rhetoric and eugenic practice anticipates concerns later taken up by writers such as Charlotte Haldane, Rose Macaulay, and Aldous Huxley. Whether Vaughan intended irony, ambivalence, or a sincere alternative vision is difficult to determine, but the result is a distinctly early twentieth-century fantasy in which neither world, Earth nor Meleager, offers a reassuring vision of what progress is for.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, red cloth binding with black lettering on spine and black borders on cover. Locke indicates two bindings, this being the cheaper of the two, and likely a later or export binding. London: Martin Secker, 1916. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p.218. ISBN: 9781333795177. #11361.
Two ownership signatures inside, page edges slightly soiled, but overall very good with the original dust jacket with darkened spine. The brittle jacket is separating along rear fold but amazingly still intact.