The Coming Race

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
While exploring the depths of a remote mine shaft, an American traveler falls through a dark subterranean chasm and stumbles into a hidden world beneath the Earth's surface.

There, he discovers the Vril-ya: an ancient, telepathic, and highly evolved subterranean civilization. The Vril-ya owe their extraordinary dominance to "Vril"—a mysterious, all-encompassing fluid energy that gives them the power to fly, heal, control machinery, and instantly annihilate entire cities.

Though their society appears to be a peaceful, classless utopia governed by reason and gender equality, the narrator soon realizes the dark truth: the Vril-ya view all surface humans as primitive, inferior barbarians. As two subterranean women vie for his affection, his presence is deemed a dangerous threat to their perfection, sparking a tense struggle for survival and escape before the underground race decides to reclaim the surface world.

First published anonymously in 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ground breaking classic is widely recognized as one of the foundational works of early science fiction and hollow-earth subterranean adventure.