Still, the fantasy of a future powered by cheap and inexhaustible electrical energy was common throughout the Victorian period. In his utopian/dystopian account of a subterranean civilisation in The Coming Race(1871), Edward Bulwer Lytton was clear that the Vril-ya's technologies were powered by electricity. The Vril-ya lived in a world in which electricity (or vril, as they called it) powered everything. Electricity ran their machinery, controlled the weather, and helped to grow crops. It was the source of their te