Russell, Addison Peale
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1826-1912) US journalist, politician and author whose Sub-Coelum: A Sky-Built Human World (1893) is a Utopia written, like so many others from this decade, to counter the influence of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888). The setting is an unspecified Near Future, in a land with no name, whose inhabitants – who constantly observe and report upon one another – are forcibly conditioned into behaviour patterns the author designates as "pure" (see B F Skinner): Sex is strictly controlled through a rigorous purging of women's freedom of action (see Feminism; Women in SF), with the result that eventually both sexes, now equally chastened, are treated equally; miscegenation and role-reversals such as men freely becoming house-husbands (see Race in SF) are approved of, but within strict principles derived from Eugenics; a tribe of intelligent monkeys (see Apes as Human) is provided with hospital care; because of the translucence of the atmosphere, folk see more clearly here than elsewhere; and honour the earth with plantings. [JC]
Addison Peale Russell
born Wilmington, Ohio: 8 September 1826
died Wilmington, Ohio: 24 July 1912
works
- Sub-Coelum: A Sky-Built Human World (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893) [hb/nonpictorial]
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